A short little riff today, just a few ideas to consider.

[ELP \\ Take a Pebble]

First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

Part II

C2.1

There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and perhaps there is purpose in the rhythm.

C2.2

Time, like an arrow. 

Like red and orange leaves drifting on a cool autumn breeze; their life under the warming sun has come and gone – and now they are left to drift along gray cobblestones, waiting.

But the arrow does not care about the passage of time, and who knows what leaves feel?

Time, in the human realm, had almost always been a relative measurement; when the sun was highest in the sky it was midday – and that worked – most of the time. When the smallest human settlements formed, clusters of buildings encircled open areas where sundials measured noon, and soon enough markets and trade fairs developed in these open areas. Time became an organizing principle even though time was still relative to place; the sun might be highest overhead at noon along the banks of the Thames estuary while along the banks of the Rhein it would already be mid-afternoon.

But that relativity was hardly worth a passing thought. There was no need for such precise measurements of time as most humans lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. 

Mariners at sea were the first to need a standardized locus of time. While it was easy enough to determine a vessel’s latitude by taking a single measurement of the sun’s angle above the horizon at local noon, deriving that vessels longitude was another matter. The globe had to be partitioned into 360 degrees, and time at zero degrees longitude had to be precisely known for meaningful calculations of local longitude to be made.

At that same approximate point in time, iron horses began pacing along evenly spaced rails, and soon enough both passengers and freight began moving faster than humans had ever moved before. Interconnecting railway lines converged at distant stations and soon enough railway companies, as well as their agents and passengers, needed accurate timetables, and for those tables to provide meaningful information local sundials would no longer suffice. Clocks, and clock towers, began to appear as humans continued to redefine their relationship to time. In time, the telegraph and then radio waves sent out their standardized time hacks, for the first time allowing coordinated human activities to occur over distances unimaginable even a few decades before. Traders in New York City could coordinate their economic activities with their counterparts in Tokyo or London almost as easily as they could converse with neighbors across the street. 

Time, in a sense, was no longer relative to place, and man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos began to change.

+++++

An old man walks along a waterfront crowded with merchant ships; the night is still and a thick fog is settling over the water in the bay. Sailors sing shanties in distant taverns and horses seem to sleep in their harnesses, waiting for the whip. Streetlights cast flickering pools of light on damp cobblestones as fallen leaves gather in gutters, while amber light bathes the scene in sepias and gold. Cargo from the latest ship to berth is being unloaded into horse drawn carts, and a handful of passengers walk down the gangplank and gather in the pools of light, and as it has been a rough passage most seem more than grateful to be back on land. 

The old man watches these passengers intently before disappearing among the leaves and shadows; a blue sphere no larger than a Danish kroner hovers over the ship, it’s sensors focused on just one of the passengers, a rather pleasant woman in her twenties.

The ship had just arrived from Königsberg, perhaps a half hour ago, and while the woman feels more tired than she ever has before, there is a hopeful patina of joy covering her lingering fatigue. She is a music teacher, yet in her heart of hearts she longs to write symphonies; she has been engaged to teach piano at a school for girls in the heart of Copenhagen, but even now she longs to travel on to Paris. Her name is Anna Regina Kant, and she was born in the small coastal city of Memel, just north of Königsberg. She has recently graduated after studying music at the university in Königsberg, and this at a time when few women gained admission to such schools, but there had been no denying her gift. Even now, as fog pressed in from the harbor and as sailors back to their ships, she felt the possible frameworks of a new composition taking shape in her mind, for in everything she found music – but most especially the sea. Still, she could not break free of the black and white ‘whales’ that had frolicked beside their ship for hours earlier that day, because one of them had seemed to stare at her for time without end.

As she stepped from the gangplank onto the bricked walkway beside the ship she looked for a carriage from the school, for they had promised that a representative would be on hand to help her out to the school’s grounds. She had all her worldly possessions with her, all that would fit into two steamer trunks, anyway, and as she had no desire to return home again, she had included all her earliest compositions.

So she felt some modest relief when a carriage pulled up and a young man called out her name. Her trunks were located and loaded atop the carriage, and soon she is on her way into the city.

And curiously, no one noticed a small sphere hovering over the wharf, even as the young woman in the carriage looked out over the harbor – where a large male orca circled patiently in the night.

The old man looked after her carriage as it rattled away from the wharf. After the carriage was out of sight he turned to the creature standing by his side and sighed.

“And so it begins. Again,” the Old Man said quietly, patiently.

“Yes. Again,” the creature said. He stood just more than two meters tall, his skin was the purest white, and his name was Pak. “We cannot fail.” 

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word…

Let’s start a tale most fitting for this bitterest season, a simple song for the unrequited among us.

[Al Stewart \\ End of the Day]

Her Book of Dreams

Chapter One

She finished taking notes then put away her writing materials; she turned off her Olympus Pearlcorder and slipped it into her briefcase, making sure that everything was just so, that everything was in the exact place she liked them. One of the physicians sitting next to her shook his head as he watched her rigid routine unfold and take shape, but she simply didn’t care what other people thought. Maybe she had once, but not now. Once her materials were secure she left the conference room and made her way to the elevators, then rode up in silence and walked to her room. She picked up the itemized bill that had been slipped under the door and looked over each entry before nodding and placing the envelope in her carry-on, then she grabbed her rolling suitcase and made her way back to the elevators, and from there on to the taxi stand beyond the ornate lobby entrance. She didn’t have to wait long and was soon on her way.

She was a physician, an ophthalmologist by training, though she considered herself a surgeon first and foremost. She had long ago decided to specialize in ophthalmologic trauma medicine, and so she spent most of her time working on eyes damaged in motor vehicle accidents – or perhaps even the occasional sliding glass door. Her’s was a most difficult specialty and few physicians chose to embark on the long journey required to gain even basic proficiency, but she had been driven to succeed in this field during her earliest training. After four years of medical school and a two year internship, she had spent a further eight years in various residencies and fellowships – and even now she spent at least a two weeks each year attending conferences such as this one in Chicago, learning about the latest research or absorbing new surgical techniques.  

She watched people hurrying along on crowded sidewalks as the taxi drove through the always congested downtown area between The Drake and Union Station, and only after she had exited the rancid old Ford did she notice that a light snow was just beginning to fall. She paid the cabbie and made her way inside the massive old station, and once inside she handed off her suitcase to one of Amtrak’s red capped attendants. She was in due course directed to the Metropolitan Lounge but, after checking the time on her phone, made her way to the upstairs food court. She’d been buying fresh roasted nuts from a vendor up there for years – every time she made this trip to Chicago, anyway – and today would be no exception. She purchased walnuts and macedamia and pistachios and put them neatly into her carryon.

The Metropolitan Lounge was just about full this time of day – it was mid-afternoon local time –  but she found a seat and looked at all the various departure times on monitors scattered around the room. Storied trains with legendary names like the California Zephyr, the Southwest Chief, and the Empire Builder all departed within a brief window of time in the late afternoon, and even a few overnight trains headed east were already showing up on the departure board – though they wouldn’t leave until later in the evening. She always booked a so-called Deluxe Bedroom, because the included bathroom space had private showering facilities, not one of the communal shower cubbies down on the lower level. And while meals were also included with sleeper service, she usually had these delivered to her room.

A half hour before their scheduled departure an announcer came on and advised that sleeping car passengers for the Empire Builder should line up by Door 6, and the usual collection of disoriented tourists shuffled over to the locked doors – but there were, she noted, a few oddballs waiting there, too. Twenty-somethings with skis headed to Montana, a wheelchair-bound woman in her twenties, and a couple of singletons like herself: business travelers who simply loathed flying, or who grew faint at the mere idea of having to board an aircraft – any aircraft – and all had queued up and were waiting anxiously. Another red cap appeared and escorted the group out onto the platform, and almost everyone remarked how much colder it suddenly seemed.

When she made it out to her assigned car she stepped aboard and made for the steep stairway that led to the upper floor, and once up there she made her way to the same bedroom – E – she almost always enjoyed this time of year. Located near the center of the car, Bedroom E was most isolated from the vibration and noise that plagued rooms over the trucks and nearer to the vestibule, a lesson her father had imparted decades ago.

She unpacked her overnight bag and found her dry-roasted macadamia nuts and had a few, and she watched as a nearby Metra commuter train pulled out of the station and headed north just as her room attendant came by and introduced herself.

“Let’s see…you’re Dr. North and I see you’ll be with us all the way to Seattle?”

“I am indeed,” Rebecca North, M.D., F.A.C.S. said. “Is the dining car back in full operation this trip?”

“It is, yes! You’ll be one of the first to try it out, too!”

“Could you put me down for the seven-thirty seating?”

“The dining car attendant will be by in a few minutes; just tell him what you want.” And with that the attendant disappeared, leaving Rebecca kind of flummoxed. Sleeping car porters had always taken care of little things like this in the past, but things change, and she knew that all too well. So had her father.

She slipped her laptop out of her carry-on and then pulled out her hand-written notes from the conference, her immediate desire being to transcribe these notes and go over the week’s high points. Almost immediately the train’s conductor knocked on the door and stepped inside her compartment.

“Ticket, please,” the gruff old man mumbled, the effort required to smile apparently too much for the old man.

She handed her travel documents to the conductor and he punched her ticket here and there before he handed it back, then he too departed wordlessly – and without smiling even once.

She started in on her notes and hardly looked up when the train pulled out of the station, heading for Milwaukee. She looked out at snow now blowing almost horizontally over the river then turned back to her notes, looking up again only when the dining car steward knocked and stepped into her compartment.

“Will you be joining us in the dining car tonight?” the polite old man asked. He was black though his hair was as white as the snow falling on the other side of the glass, and his smile was big and bright enough to warm even the grouchiest curmudgeon’s stony heart.

“Yes. What times are available?”

“Your attendant told me you wanted seven thirty. Does that still work for you?”

Rebecca smiled and nodded. “Do you happen to have the trout?” she asked hopefully.

“You know, I think we have a few steelhead. Should I put your name on one?”

“Oh, could you please? That would be wonderful!”

The old man smiled and nodded as he scribbled notes on a pad. “We’ll see you at seven-thirty, then.” She knew these old timers survived on tips, so she made a mental note to make sure she left him a nice one.

The car swayed and rumbled through a series of switches as the train made it’s way through the vast yards north of downtown, but soon enough they began picking up speed and a series of north side suburban stations reeled by as a feeble sun gave way to the evening. Lights came on in the sleeping car and the conductor made a few announcements as Rebecca resumed working through her lecture notes. She looked up from time to time, saw lights wink on in distant houses and she realized they were out of the city now, streaking through rolling farmland on the way to Wisconsin – and she found it easy enough to wonder what life was like out here on the prairie in the dead of winter – like how the warmth of a wood stove and a hot dinner waiting on the table would be the biggest reward for another day tending small herds in their milking barns. 

She’d hardly ever treated rural patients like these, she thought. She’d studied medicine in Chicago and completed her training in Boston before returning home to Seattle, so had spent her entire career helping urban “city dwellers,” not farmers and ranchers. People were people, however, and eyes were eyes, but she’d recently grown more and more aware of a divide between people that lived in large cities and their rural “cousins,” a divide she recognized but hardly understood.

Rebecca leaned back in her seat and soon enough her eyes closed as her mind began to drift on other currents, and it seemed as if only a few seconds had passed when the sleeping car attendant poked her head in the door to inform the doctor that her seven-thirty dinner seating had just been called. Rebecca sat bolt upright as the momentary disorientation that had gripped her began easing off, but she nodded and smiled and stood to make her way forward to the dining car.

The kindly old steward met her as she entered and graciously escorted her to an empty table at the far end of the swaying car, and she noted this table was empty and sighed in hopeful relief. One of the few things she disliked about travel by rail was having to share a table with – more often than not – complete strangers, and she found these chance encounters awkward – at their best. Pleasantries were typically exchanged, followed by the usual banter: ‘Is this your first trip on Amtrak?’ or the dreaded ‘So, what do you do?’ That question invariably led to unwanted rants about the ills of Social Security or a recitation of bad encounters with “obviously incompetent” physicians, so when asked she usually shrugged and said she was ‘Just a housewife,’ and let it go at that.

The steward helped her get seated and poured a fresh glass of ice water, then asked what she wanted to drink with her trout.

“What are you serving with the fish?” she asked.

“A salad to start, and I’d recommend the Caesar. The trout is served with rice pilaf and broccoli. We’re having wine tastings tomorrow afternoon, so we have a nice selection from Oregon and Washington state onboard.”

“A chilled Riesling, by any chance?”

He nodded and beamed proudly. “Should I bring out a bottle? What you don’t finish this evening will be ready for you tomorrow,” he added.

She thought a moment and then nodded – just as a lone diner appeared at the far end of the car. The steward raced off to greet the man, then brought him along to Rebecca’s table – and all the while she peered out the window at the raging blizzard on the other side of the glass. As they approached she turned and gazed at her new companion and inwardly groaned.

He appeared to be about her age – in his mid-50s or thereabouts – and the man was wearing pressed jeans and a white button down dress shirt, but what really caught her eye was his purple rag wool socks and teal green Birkenstocks. Eclectic, to say the least. He had to be about six-foot four, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds. He was pale, his face hadn’t seen a razor in a few days, and he was moving stiffly, as if his joints ached. The man smiled at her as he sat and his eyes pulled her in, if only because there was something vaguely familiar about them. About all his features, really.

“Howdy,” the man sighed more than spoke, but he made good eye contact and held her there – before turning to the steward.

“Could I get you something to drink?” the steward asked.

“Ice water will do me fine,” the man replied, his accent hard to place.

A waiter appeared as soon as the steward walked off, and he gave the man a menu and a form to fill out before he too disappeared.

“Anything good on this menu?” he asked her.

And she shrugged. “I understand the flatiron steak is pretty reliable. I’m not sure about the salmon.”

“What are you having?”

“I asked earlier if they had trout available. Sometimes they do, but it’s usually not on the menu.”

“Kind of a secret, then?” he sighed before he changed position a little. “Not in the mood for fish, anyway. What am I supposed to do with this form?”

“Name and room number up top, then you just check off your selections.”

He scribbled his name and room number but then gave up. “Could you handle the rest for me?”

She smiled and took the form and looked it over, noting his name was Sam Stillwell. “So, you get a salad, choice of garden or Caesar, then with your steak – let’s see, that comes with a baked potato and broccoli – and you also get dessert – cheesecake or the apple crisp, which I recommend.”

The man nodded. “I guess a Caesar salad and the crisp.”

“You may have coffee or tea, and they have wine available.”

He shook his head absentmindedly. “Just water for me tonight.”

She had already measured his pulse by watching his carotids, and counted his respiration rate as she checked out the color of his lips and nail beds, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to tell that the man was in pain. A fine bead of perspiration lined his forehead and upper lip, and his right hand was shaking a little.

“I’m having wine, a Riesling, if you’d like to try a glass?” She couldn’t believe what she’d just done and was more than a little disoriented by this reaching out, but she heard a voice inside telling her this was not the time for inhibited reticence.

But he once again shook his head, then suddenly taking deep breath he steadied himself by holding onto the edge of the tabletop – before he closed his eyes and slowly let go of the inhaled air. “Sorry,” he said.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s troubling you?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Sorry, but no. No pity parties for me.”

“Alright,” she said as she handed the man’s selections to their waiter, then she looked at the man and held out her right hand. “Rebecca North. And you are?”

He looked the woman in the eye again, then at her extended hand, and a moment later he reached out and took her hand in his. “Sam.”

“Sam? You running from the police or something?”

He shook his head and shrugged. “Where you headed, Rebecca?”

“Seattle. You?”

“Palo Alto. Santa Barbara, eventually, but I wanted to walk around Seattle again so I’ll probably hang there for a few days.”

“Oh? Did you live there once?”

“No, just visited a few times. Always thought it would be a good place to live.”

“It is, despite what you hear these days.”

He shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention to the talking heads. All they seem to be peddling is fear.”

The steward brought her bottle of wine and poured her a bit to taste, and after she smiled her approval he filled the glass with a modest amount.

“Are you sure you don’t want a glass?” she asked the man again.

And again he shook his head.

“So,” she began, “what’s in Santa Barbara?”

“Home. I grew up there – and I just wanted to see all the places that used to be important to me.”

“Things change. When was the last time you were there?”

“Fifteen years ago. When my dad passed.”

“Your mother?”

He looked away. “She died a few years before he did.”

“Any friends there?”

“We’ll see.”

“Sam? Do you have any friends – anywhere?”

He looked at her and shrugged. “Used to have all the friends in the world, but like you said – things change.”

“What are you on, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Fentanyl, a patch. Why, does it show?”

“What’s it for?”

“Retroperitoneal dissection.”

She closed her eyes in a deep grimace for a moment, then looked at him again. “Seminoma?”

“Mixed. Seminoma and teratoma.”

“Chemo?”

He nodded. “You a doc?”

She nodded and smiled. “Sorry,” she sighed. “I hope I haven’t ruined your evening.” Again she stared into the stranger’s face, and again she felt something familiar about him. ‘Sam Stillwell…where do I know that name from…?’

Their salads came – just as a wave of recognition washed over her. ‘Of course…Mason and Stillwell – and their second album. West Side Wind, released in the 90s. She’d worn out that album, listened to it all through med school, and a few of the songs on that record were still among her favorites…

“So, Dr. North, what kind of doc are you?”

“Eyes.”

“An M.D.?”

“Yes. I pretty much just do trauma surgery.”

“I guess you’ve seen it all, then,” he said, and she noticed his easy going smile fade away, but for a moment she had seen the same smile that was on that album cover.

And now she felt a little flush of her own, and maybe she was a little weak in the knees too – and she really didn’t know how to respond to her feelings. As her mind struggled she found her fork and took a bite of salad, then she met his question head on. “Most of the time I deal with the results of MVAs, car accidents and the like. What about you?”

“Me?”

“What are you doing these days?”

He hesitated and she looked at his hands. Long fingers, just like her own. Clean, well kept fingernails, so at least that part of his personality was still intact. “You mean before I became a full time cancer patient?” he finally said.

Once again she met his gaze and held it, and she decided to change her course. “Where’d you go for treatment?”

“Sloan Kettering.”

“Can’t do better than that. Did they give you a prognosis?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact they did. And that’s why I’m on this train.”

“Oh?”

“I guess you could call this my farewell tour because, you see, they gave up and now I’m off to see the wizard.”

“The wonderful and all-knowing Wizard of Oz? So, you’re following the yellow brick road?”

“Something like that. I’m going to stop off in Palo Alto and see someone there. You think maybe I could have a few sips of that wine?”

She caught the steward’s eye and waved him over, asked for another glass and the old man smiled as he walked off to fetch another wine glass.

“You ought to try your salad while it’s still cold,” she said, taking another bite of her own.

He tentatively reached for his fork but she immediately saw the problem: his hands were shaking so badly he could barely grasp the thing, and he instantly looked defeated as it slipped from his hand.

So she took his fork and speared some lettuce, then looked into his eyes again. “Meet me halfway?” she asked.

And he leaned over the table and let her feed him.

“Good?” she asked.

He smiled and nodded. “You have no idea.”

When she had a second wine glass she filled it halfway, then leaned over and helped him drink; he closed his eyes and sighed. “Riesling, did you say?”

“That’s right.”

“God, it’s been a while. That tastes just like heaven.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten real food?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve been drinking those protein shakes…”

“Ensure?”

“That’s the one. Dark chocolate. Um-um, so yummy,” he said, his sonorous voice dripping with honied, well intentioned sarcasm. 

She laughed a little but saw the pain in his eyes and backed off, then she fed him the salad before she finished her own.

“Why are you doing this?” he finally asked, his eyes locked on hers once again.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, the fact that you don’t know me comes to mind. That, and I’m probably ruining your evening.”

“You don’t strike me as a cynic, Sam. What’s wrong with lending someone a hand?”

“Nothing. So, tell me something…I assume you know who I am?”

She nodded slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly. 

He sighed and looked down, then slowly shook his head. “I guess I already knew that,” he sighed.

“And I assumed you didn’t want that to intrude,” she countered, smiling gently when he looked up again.

“Intrude?”

“It’s been my experience,” she said, “that celebrities often prefer anonymity – at times like this.”

“You’ve dealt with many…celebrities?” 

“A few. Last summer comes to mind. A child ran through a sliding glass door on a large yacht. She was helicoptered in with her parents, and keeping the media walled-off was a priority.”

He shrugged.

Their salad plates were taken away and their entrees were served, and he of course looked at her plate, then his. “Looks good. Why don’t you go ahead,” he stated.

And she reached over and slid his plate close, then she sliced the steak and fed him a piece before she sliced a piece of trout. She speared this and fed the fish to him. He rolled his eyes a little and shook his head, but he never broke eye contact with her. “Which do you prefer?” she asked.

“Is that a steelhead?”

She nodded, then she took another slice of trout and fed it to him.

“I think I like this more than salmon, and that’s saying something.”

“Less fishy,” she advised, “but the texture is similar.”

“You must get great salmon in Seattle?”

“The market at the Fisherman’s Terminal. They unload every morning at five-thirty.”

“I always thought Pike Place was the place to go.”

“Too touristy, too many people.”

“You have kids?”

“No. Never went down that road.”

“That’s surprising. You give great fork.”

She smiled with her eyes, then helped him take some wine. “Which do you like more?”

“They’re both decent, but I think the trout agrees with me.”

She cut more fish and started to lift it across to him but he shook his head. “I’m not going to take your dinner…”

“You’re not taking it, Sam…I’m giving it. There’s a difference, you know?”

Again, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this to you,” he said, suddenly getting ready to leave.

“I wish you’d stay,” she said, startled by this retreat.

He leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms protectively, then he looked out the window at the lights of a big city just visible through the raging blizzard. “I wonder where we are now?” he muttered to his reflection there in the glass.

“Milwaukee,” she replied after she checked the time on her phone. “There’s usually a station stop here, ten minutes or so for the smokers.”

“You’d better eat your dinner before it gets cold.”

“I will if you will.”

He nodded, then leaned forward to take the next bite. After he finished chewing and while she was cutting more steak he looked at her anew. “So, tell me about Rebecca North. What’s her story?”

“Simple, really. My dad worked for the Northern Pacific Railway until he retired, and my parents had a house in Tacoma. Mom was a teacher, high school chemistry and physics. I have two sisters and they live in Seattle too.”

“Where’d you go to med school?”

“University of Chicago, and I did all my post-grad work in Boston.”

“Married?”

“No, never. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of school, so I think I conscientiously just decided to put all that off until I was through with school and, well…after I moved back to Seattle my life became more and more hectic. There was a time, I think, when I realized I’d never be able to devote the time necessary to be either a good mother or wife, so I turned away from all that.”

“Regrets?”

She nodded. “Never getting close to anyone, never experiencing…that kind of life…”

He looked at her and nodded. “And if you could do it all over again?”

She too looked out the window, then back at him a moment later. “I think I’m doing what I was meant to do, and while I’m happy with what I’ve done with my life there’s still an empty place inside me. I guess I’ll never know what was supposed to…” – and then suddenly she stammered to a jolting stop.

“What is it? You looked a little shocked?”

“Gawd…I’ve never talked like this to anyone. Really, I’m so sorry…”

“You don’t need to apologize…not to me…”

“I can’t…I shouldn’t unload on you…”

“Gad, are you crying?” he asked, grabbing an unused napkin off the table and leaning across to wipe her cheeks, even though his trembling hands got in the way of the gesture. 

She took the napkin and dabbed her eyes, then looked at him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me?” she sighed.

“Well, it sure isn’t the wine. You’ve hardly touched yours,” he said, smiling innocently now. “And who knows, maybe you’ve been holding onto your feelings a little too tight, and maybe for too long. You got to get these things out from time to time, you know? Take ’em for a walk…”

“But you’re a complete stranger…”

“And who better to listen? In a few days we’ll go our separate ways and no one will be the wiser, and the only regret you’ll have will be not eating that trout!”

She laughed at that, then leaned forward and sliced more food for them both. “How about we just share. You know, like surf and turf!”

“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” he said conspiratorially, now smiling broadly.

“So, tell me about you?” she said as she resumed feeding him. “What’s your story? In a nutshell?”

“Mine? Let’s see, I grew up in Santa Barbara and music was always my thing. I grew up listening to Tears for Fears and The Police; by the time I was getting good on the guitar the big groups were all slipping into metal.”

“But not you?”

He took a deep breath as he reflected on the cascading memories that came for him. “You know, I liked Nirvana – a lot, really. I really, really liked the Stone Temple Pilots too, but I couldn’t see myself going down that road. For a long time I felt drawn to Sting and Pat Metheny, but when I think back…none of us could escape Paul Simon’s gravity. He turned folk into something new, but at the same time he was reaching deeper and deeper into the past, and he kept coming up with…with strange new languages. All those guys up on Laurel Canyon, really.” He paused as he thought about meeting those people. “Stephen Stills. I think I kept coming back to Stills probably more than anyone else, but Seals and Croft, Loggins and Messina, all those guys were impossible to ignore.”

“Laurel Canyon?”

“It’s a street in Bel Air, above Beverly Hills. Close enough to the scene on Sunset and the studios in Culver City and Burbank. Lots of bungalows back in the 60s, rents weren’t bad and it was close enough to UCLA so every drug known to man was available. I heard they made acid in the organic chemistry labs late at night…”

“I think that’s an urban myth.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Anyway, then came The Graduate and The Sound of Silence and Mrs. Robinson and then The Beatles splintered and for a while the universe shifted to Laurel Canyon. Stills met Crosby and Graham Nash and then Love The One Your With morphed into Judy Blue Eyes. Elton John was English but by the time he was ready to record that little corner of the universe had shifted from Penny Lane to Hollywood and Vine, and like everyone else he came to California.”

“Why California?”

“Brian Wilson is as good a reason as any. The Brits had Lennon and Paul McCartney; we had Brian Wilson. The music scene in LA would have never come together the way it did without the Beach Boys. Then things shifted north for a while, to San Francisco. Seattle didn’t really happen until the late-80s.”

“When did you get serious about music?”

“In the womb. Mom always said I came out the chute with a twelve string in one hand and a pick in the other.”

She smiled. “How does cheesecake sound?”

He nodded. “You know, I’m picking up the vibe that you know my work.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “West Side Wind got me through med school.” He nodded, but then he looked away and she thought he looked disappointed. 

“Mason was the real deal. He wrote all the music on that one; I did the lyrics.”

“You’re a poet.”

“Thanks.”

She assumed he must’ve been used to the constant adoration of a million lovelorn teenagers at some point in his life, but now he seemed almost embarrassed by the compliment. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through when he died. A motorcycle crash, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “His girlfriend was with him too.”

“You knew her too, I take it?”

“We were close.”

“It never goes away, does it?”

He looked at her and held her in his eyes for a long time, then he smiled. “You sure are easy to talk to.”

“Two ships that pass in the night,” she sighed. She noted the train was stopped now, and that they were inside the new station in Milwaukee, the concrete around them bathed in bilious yellow sodium vapor light – and very little snow was visible in this part of the station. She ordered cheesecake and coffee, and she wondered – hint-hint – if the steward might find the makings for Irish coffee somewhere in the kitchen, then she turned back to Sam.

“So, your dad worked for the railroad?” he asked. “Is that why you’re on the train?”

“I hate airplanes. It’s a genetic thing.”

“Understandable,” he said knowingly. “The airlines have grown into monsters.”

“We all have, Sam. We let them treat us the same way we treat each other. We used to expect more from them because we expected more of ourselves, I guess.”

“So, you are a cynic!” he said lightly.

“I may well be – about some things, but I usually consider myself a realist.”

“When you find out the difference between those two, let me know, will you?”

“Why did you give up on music?”

“I don’t think I did, really. After I moved to Maine I usually played for coffee or a bowl of soup. No advertising, no tours…”

“And no new albums?”

“You know, oddly enough I started producing and that was enough for me. New faces, then I got into all the new recording technologies. I got into session work for a while, until rap and hip-hop came along, anyway. You can’t fight the big labels; they want what sells – nothing new about that. Even so, I still make enough to live comfortably.”

“Will there ever be a new album?”

“From me? Hell, I don’t know. I never stopped writing but my voice ain’t what it used to be…and don’t you dare tell me voices mellow with age.”

“Like fine wine?” she teased.

“Gawd, how many times have I heard that one.”

“How many people have asked you to put out a new album?”

“Okay…okay. Point taken.”

“Maybe at some point you’d consider it a gift to all the people who loved your music.”

He nodded. “Nice thought. So, what do you do when you’re not working?”

“No such thing, Sam.”

“You’re always working?”

“I have a pull out sofa in my office at the hospital, and my own shower there, too.”

“Dear God. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds just awful.”

“I know. The thing is, I’m in my fifties and my hands won’t last. A few more years and I’ll be done, only able to take on the easiest cases, and I’m not sure I’d like that.”

“What’ll you do then?”

“Teach.”

“That’s it? Burn out your body then put yourself out to pasture?”

“Interesting way of looking at it.”

“Well, pardon my French, but what the fuck! You’re fixing eyes so your patients can get back out and see the world, and guess who’s never going to see the world?”

His words slammed home and she seemed taken aback for a moment, then she collected her thoughts. “I’m not even sure what I’d go looking for. I wouldn’t know what to do?”

“And that’s the beauty of it all, Rebecca. The uncertainty. Not knowing what’s around the next bend in the road. The complete mystery of going to the airport and getting on the first plane to anywhere, then getting off the plane and looking around for the unfamiliar. When one direction looks more interesting, or more mysterious than the other directions, you head off in that direction…”

“Where would you go?”

“The Dolomites. Never went, always wanted to. I’d get my camera and just go, walk those mountains until my legs gave out.”

“Would you write music?”

“I always tried to listen to the mountains, tried to hear what they had to say. I haven’t done that in a long time, but yeah, I might try to put that into music again.”

“Maybe you ought to do it, then.”

“I’m not sure I’m up to it now.”

“Would it hurt to try?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said softly, looking down at his shaking hands.

“There’s no one in your life?”

He shook his head. He never looked up and simply shook his head like this was a shameful admission, and for a moment she thought he looked like a little boy.

“No one?” she asked again.

He looked up at her for a moment, then turned and looked out the window. “When did we leave the station?”

“A few minutes ago,” she said, looking at the now empty dining car. Only the steward and their waiter remained, and they were cleaning up the car, getting it ready for breakfast in the morning. “Sam, I think we closed the place down. We’re the only ones left…”

He looked at his watch and shook his head. “Nine-thirty. We’ve been here almost two hours.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.”

“Do you think that’s all this is?” he asked, his eyes unfocused. “Two ships passing in the night, I mean?”

“What? You mean why it’s been so easy to talk?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Sam.”

“What’s the deal with breakfast?”

“The dining car opens at six. The French toast is really good.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience talking again,” he grinned.

She smiled too. “I look forward to it, actually.”

“You going to be here at six?”

She shrugged – with a bit of larceny in her eye. “You sleepy?”

“No, not at all,” he answered.

“In the lounge car, well, downstairs there’s a little café; they usually have a few liqueurs on hand. Want to try our luck?”

“I’m game if you are.”

He tried to stand but she saw he had to use both hands to steady himself on the table, and it was obvious there’d been extensive nerve damage – and she knew his cancer was in his spine so the worst was yet to come. She went around and took his arm in hers and led him to the next car forward, to the lounge car, and after she got him seated she went down the steep stairs to the little café. They had Irish whiskey, Tia Maria and Gran Marnier in tiny bottles behind the counter, so she picked up three of each as well as two little plastic cups filled with ice. With these in a little box she marched back up the stairs and found him staring out the windows at the blizzard raging away in the night.

“The snow looks so strange flying by,” he said, lost in thought as he watched the ghostly streaks flying by, then he held fingers up to the window and placed his open palm on the glass. “So cold,” he whispered. “Do you remember Saint Judy’s Comet?”

“Paul Simon?”

He nodded. “‘…and leave a spray of diamonds in its wake.’ Man, talk about poetry…”

“I loved that album, too,” she sighed.

“What was your favorite? Surely not Kodachrome?”

She smiled. “Something So Right.”

“Oh, so you are a romantic after all.”

“You didn’t know that already?”

“I was leanin’ that way but I wasn’t quite sure yet. So, what did you find down there?”

“Tia Maria and Gran Marnier. And it looks like Jameson’s Irish Whiskey if you want something a little less sweet.”

“Tia Maria for me,” he said. He made a fist and pumped his fingers a few times, then reached out for the little plastic cup – but his hand was simply trembling too much and he shook his head as he fought back the anger of impotence.

“Let me give you a hand,” she whispered.

And again he let her baby him – if only because she seemed to enjoy herself – then he leaned back and rolled the liqueur around under his tongue and closed his eyes as a memory came back to him. “First time I had this stuff was down in Mexico. Puebla. I have a place down there, for a while, really. Big courtyard, palm trees, noisy birds. Have a housekeeper and a cook. The cook makes fresh tortillas every morning after breakfast; I remember the soft slap-slap-slap as she shapes them with her hands. The smell as she fries them for just a second. And she made guacamole just about every day. Went to an open air market every morning. Both of them live in the house, and the cook’s little girl lives with her. Already teaching her to cook. On weekends they would make tortillas together.”

“Sounds a little like paradise,” she sighed. “How long have you had the place?”

“I picked it up twenty years ago.”

“What? You mean…”

“Yup, I usually go down in October, stay through Christmas. Didn’t make it this year. Really wanted to. I need to make arrangements for them.”

“Arrangements?”

“I’ve been putting money away for them, so they’ll be able to stay in the house after I’m…you know…”

“Do they know?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you have a lawyer down there?”

He nodded. “I guess I should call him, you know?”

“I think you should go down and talk with them. Obviously they’re important to you.”

“Chattel,” he sighed. “They literally conveyed with the property when I bought the place. Almost like any other part of the house. They were being paid about fifty bucks a month.”

“What about the cook’s daughter?”

“She was supposed to be trained to step into the job when her time came. I sent her to school. She’s in college now, in Mexico City. I spent more Christmases with them than I did with my parents growing up.”

“Really?”

“Spoiled her rotten, I reckon, but I loved every minute of it.”

“Why didn’t you move there permanently?”

“Too hot. Now the cartels have made life down there a little too dicey – for everyone.”

“Drugs…don’t get me started,” she snarled, her anger right out there on her sleeve.

He shrugged. “Drugs aren’t the problem; they’re a symptom. People take drugs to escape reality, or to somehow make their reality more palatable, more bearable. You’d think after thirty thousand years we’d have figured out how to do that.” 

“So, is it ironic we’re sitting her sipping a drug?”

“Ironic? No, I don’t think so. This tastes good; it’s socially agreeable. A needle in the arm is neither.” 

“Many of the people I see on the operating table are there – indirectly, most of the time – because of alcohol…”

“Moderation,” he sighed. “Somehow we forgot how to live – well…I’m thinking of balance and harmony – not just with the material world but with each other. Everything seems out of balance right now, at least it feels that way most of the time. Everything started coming too easily, and maybe we forgot that sometimes it takes hard work to maintain that balance, that there are relationships we just can’t take for granted.” 

“But we do, don’t we?” she added. “So, you were living in Maine?”

He nodded. “Camden. Kind of a quiet place these days, or at least it’s getting back to quiet.”

“Oh?”

“Same thing, Rebecca. A credit card company – MBNA, I think – moved a lot of their operations to Camden and Belfast, built these huge facilities and pretty soon everyone in the area was working there. Then the bottom fell out and all those people lost their jobs, but worse than that, there were all these massive buildings suddenly sitting empty – almost overnight. Everything was out of balance, boom-bust only now the town was in trouble – only there wasn’t anyone around to pick up the pieces. It was hard to watch, and it’s taken ten years but things are finally getting back to something like normal.”

“Sounds hard to watch, but Boeing was like that in Seattle, then MicroSoft and all the rest. Savage inequality, I think they call it.”

“Which is just people being people, and I’d have never made a dime without music companies and radio stations and MTV.”

“I don’t know if I should ask, but what’s in Palo Alto?”

“Some research going on with immunotherapy.”

“Did they stage you?”

“Four.”

She nodded and looked out the window. noted they were already past the Dells. “Brave,” she said. “Most people would just give up.”

“I’m in no hurry to die.”

“Were you serious about the Dolomites?”

“I’m not making any plans just yet, but yeah.”

“Is your patch holding up?”

“The fentanyl? Not really, but I’m not sure I want this to end.”

“This? To end?”

“Sitting and talking, with you. It’s the first time in months that I’ve felt almost human.”

“I’m not sleepy yet. We can go sit in your room for a while if you’d like. Once you put on a fresh patch you’ll want to go to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“And I can’t sit here doing nothing, not if you’re in pain.”

“The Hippocrates thing, right?”

“Something like that,” she said, smiling a little. He was perspiring more now, and he had winced when he got worked up talking about Camden, so she knew it was getting close to that time.

“Let’s at least finish our drinks first?” he sighed, signaling defeat. 

“Alright.”

“So, where would you go? If you were in my place?”

She shrugged. “I read Heidi once, when I was little. I always wanted to go to Switzerland.”

“And you’ve never been?”

She shook her head. “Only time off I get…well, I go to the annual convention in Chicago.”

“So, the only time you take off is still work related?”

“I hate to say it, but I’m pretty dedicated to my work.”

“It’s admirable, Rebecca. At least in a way it is.”

“I know, I know. But it’s also kind of sad,” she said, her voice now almost a whisper.

“No time like the present. Why don’t you just go? Pack up your bags and just head on out to the airport…?”

“I’m afraid I’m not exactly the spontaneous type.”

“You know what?”

“Hm-m?”

“The last two things you said just now are ‘kind of sad’ and ‘I’m afraid.’ I see a trend here…”

“Do you indeed?” she said, suddenly brightening.

“Yup. I do. I think you need to go over there and eat fondue ’til you’re so fat you can’t move. Maybe even walk some alpine meadows. With a dog…one of those big, huge, furry Swiss dogs.”

“A Saint Bernard?”

“No-no-no. The black one.”

“Ah, the Bernese Mountain Dog. Why that one.”

“Because after I die I want to come back as one of those.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“I want to lie on my back and have a doting girl give me belly rubs all day.”

She smiled at the image in her mind’s eye. “You are such a guy,” she sighed.

“Hey, it works for me…”

They finished up their Tia Marias then she helped him stand, and he held onto her as she led them through the dining car and then back to their sleeping car. He had Room B so the compartment was almost right over the trucks, or wheels, but she noted the noise wasn’t all that bad. The attendant had, however, made up the bed so there wasn’t a lot of room to move around.

“Well damn,” Sam said when he saw the constricted space…

…but before he could object she went in and raised the bed, restoring the long sofa to its daytime position. “Let’s get you down,” she said, helping him out of his coat and getting him seated. “Where do you keep your patches?”

“Camera bag. There,” he pointed. “In the back pouch.”

She handed him the slate colored bag and he opened the pouch, removed a fresh patch. “You want to do the honors?”

She shrugged as he handed the sealed white envelope to her. “You’ve been perspiring for hours,” she said. “Would you like to shower before you get into your nightclothes?”

He shook his head. “I’m feeling too nauseated right now.”

She took his wrist and counted-off his pulse as she looked him over. “Do you have any Zofran?”

He nodded and pulled a little amber prescription bottle from the bag, took out a tiny pill and slipped it under his tongue. Rebecca then prepared the site with a swab and applied the patch.

He thanked her, then she sat beside him and waited.

And it didn’t take long; a few minutes later he leaned against her, but then she moved over and laid his head in her lap. She hesitated, but then started gently rubbing his head – and with gently swirling thumbs she massaged his temples until he started snoring gently.

But she did not get up and leave. She did not stop massaging his head. And when she was sure he was sleeping soundly she reached down and rubbed his chest for a while, and she smiled as the idea of a big black Bernese Mountain Dog pranced into her mind.

She continued rubbing away until she too felt sleep coming, then she quietly leaned against the window until she felt her eyes close, and the dream came. 

And on the other side of the glass, as their train rumbled through the night, an impossible storm gathered strength, then settled its fury on the way ahead.

(c) 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | just fiction, plain and simple, every word. 

[Seals & Croft \\ We may Never Pass This Way Again]

It has been a difficult autumn, and I will not bore you with the details. I’ve not been writing because the words would not come, and in a way I was reluctant to try again. It is inevitable that events surrounding one’s life make their way onto the page, and I simply did not care to see my work become a reflection of events beyond my control. Writing is, after all, often about control. Controlling thoughts, moods, the dynamics of life – and death – and painting those things with words is hard enough as is.

This story was born of such reflection, and I dare not say more.

[I Dreamed Last Night \\ Blue Jays]

So, grab a cup of tea and read on…and do let me know your impressions.

Why Do Stars Fall Down From The Sky?

There was a moment up there, right when the power came off, that the universe seemed to give up for a moment and time just seemed to let go of me with a sigh. Who knows, maybe the whole ball of wax relaxed, maybe everything everywhere took a deep breath before getting back down to business. Strange, because for a moment that’s what I felt. The jet’s engines powered back and little spoilers popped up on the top of the wing and I could feel the aircraft’s nose kind of drop away a little as gravity and drag got back to work. Sitting in the first row in economy – I think it was seat 7A – I sighted along the wing’s leading edge and could just make out the distant skyline of the city, out there inside misty gray hazes lost somewhere in the forbidden spaces between now and then.

Even from this distance I could make out landmarks that had defined my childhood: the Southland Life Building, the pin-striped  First National Bank building, and I could even see the blocky white form of Union Station, too. With that landmark in view I knew it was only a few blocks from there to Dealey Plaza and the infamous School Book Depository. If you knew where to look – and I most certainly did – you could follow the motorcade’s route from the Grassy Knoll along Stemmons to Parkland Memorial Hospital – where once upon a time our little universe really did come to a stop.

That moment seemed to define my generation, especially those of us growing up in Dallas at the time. Or maybe it didn’t define us so much as it haunted us. When people asked where I was from I always answered Highland Park and left it at that. It was the way people looked at you if you answered Dallas. I think it’s called guilt by association, but it’s not hard to see it in peoples’ eyes.

I’d been in the library – at High Park High School – when the principal’s scratchy voice came on over the intercom and announced that the president was dead, that he’d been murdered downtown and that school was done for the day. Two years later I graduated and as I flew west to San Francisco I swore I’d never return to Dallas, and I managed to hold true to that oath for almost ten years.

By that time I was wrapping up a five year hitch in the Air Force, not fighting in Vietnam but flying KC-135 aerial refueling tankers for the Strategic Air Command out of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. The -135 was operationally similar to the Boeing 707, and in the early 70s airlines needed pilots with such experience; I found TWAs offer irresistible and headed off to Kansas City to start training, then on to Boston – where I soon found myself flying across the Atlantic twice a week, usually to London but occasionally to Paris or Frankfurt, in the right seat of a 707-320c. Dallas receded in my mind to a distant, unpleasant memory, and I was happy to let it stay there.

And I might have been successful if not for the determined efforts of my father.

A physician, he too had gone to Highland Park High. He’d met the woman of his dreams there, too, and in due course he married her. I was the result of that union, by the way, but my mother was an actress – and actually a rather good one. When I was three years old she left for Hollywood and, like me, never looked back. A year later the divorce was finalized and dad drifted for a while before meeting another former classmate at the Dallas Country Club. She played golf and tennis and poker and could put down a half bottle of Jack Daniels without batting an eye and this wild-eyed woman became the mother I was destined to remember most. She gave my father a daughter, a timid, diaphanous creature who played the piano by day and read Agatha Christie novels all through the night as she charted a jagged course through looming mental illness in a constant search for our father’s love and attention.

Father was a thoracic surgeon and always busy, while Joan – wife number two – spent all her waking hours at the country club playing cards and drinking bourbon. Like many alcoholics, she possessed two personalities: an aloof sober variety of patrician princess and; a drunk bully. I rarely saw her when she was sober, but soon enough learned her modus operandi: When she and father made it home in the evening see launched into him until, after a few years, he found other, less stressful ways to spend his time. After she ran him out of the house she turned on me for a few years, until my voice dropped, anyway, then she turned on her daughter, my sister, Carol. Perhaps my time in that madhouse had something to do with my oath to never return, but I’ll let others be the judge of that.

Not long after I settled in Boston I met a girl that seemed to punch all the right buttons and while we dated off and on for a year nothing came of it and in the aftermath I seemed to fall into a rut. I would spend the occasional layover with a stewardess but remained otherwise serially unattached – and after a while realized that I ‘almost’ liked living that way. ‘Almost’ being the operative word to keep in mind.

I went back to Kansas City and transitioned to the L-1011 TriStar, but was soon back in Boston – flying to Paris now all the time and growing more comfortable with the time I spent in that city but increasingly feeling at odds with my life. I was still in my thirties – though just – and though I spoke to my father weekly – as in almost every Sunday – I realized I had almost no attachments left to the people who were supposed to be my family.

Father was still technically married to Joan, my mother-in-law, but now, twenty years after I’d left she was by all accounts beyond redemption. My sister, Carol, had developed an apparent affinity for razor blades and overdoses and had been in and out of Timberlawn – the gentile psychiatric hospital east of downtown – so many times she had her own room there. Father still lived in the same house at the end of Willow Wood Circle he always had, a low pink brick thing that looked vaguely French, but every time I talked with him he sounded more miserable than the last time we spoke; by this point I was starting to worry about him.

I suppose I shouldn’t have. He’d been seeing someone, of course. For years, as it happened.

And oddly enough, neither my father nor Deborah Baker felt the least bit ashamed of the arrangement.

They played golf together. They spent Sundays fishing at Koon Kreek together. And then they decided to go to Paris together, but first they stopped off in Boston.

+++++

I knew her, of course. Genie and I, Deborah’s daughter, had known each other since grade school and we had been an ‘thing’ during our senior year at Highland Park. We’d gone our separate ways after graduation, me to Berkeley and she to Tulane, but I’d neither seen nor heard from her since – and had no idea what she’d been up to. Seeing my father and – ahem, Mrs. Baker – walking up the Jetway at Logan left me feeling at little disoriented because, let’s face it, they were both married – just not to each other, and I had known Deborah most of my life – just in a very different context. And I guess I was supposed to either go along with this charade, or be gracious and not say anything untoward about their new relationship.

To put this whole mess in sharper relief, I really didn’t know my biological mother – beyond what I’d seen of her in movies and on television – and I think is by now apparent that I really disliked Joan, my mother-in-law. I’d always appreciated the sense of family Deborah Baker created in her home, and under the circumstances perhaps that was inevitable – because I felt safe there. Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas felt stilted and coldly contrived under my mother-in-law’s stewardship, yet the same holidays had felt warm and cozy when I dropped by the Baker house, and yet it was those few instances that rattled me most. I’d simply never known what the fuss about Christmas was all about, as Joan was always too drunk to give a damn and Dad was usually in surgery taking care of another broken heart. By the time I was ten, and Carol was, I think, around seven years old, Christmas had become something all of us dreaded – and after seeing Christmas in the Baker’s home I knew that was all wrong.

So as I watched Dad and Mrs. Baker walk up the Jetway I felt that lingering dichotomy; Dad with his faint grimace of a smile and Deborah Baker with the same welcoming eyes I remembered from my teens. It was, after all, just a few days before Christmas.

With their luggage checked through to Paris/Charles de Gaulle all that was left to do was shake my father’s hand and hug Deborah Baker, then we walked along inside uncomfortable cocoons of silence over to the international terminal for our flight – and with the two of them in first and me up front in the right seat, it promised to be an interesting flight. After we made our way onboard I clued-in the head stewardess and asked her to take care of my old man, and after we arrived early the next morning I helped get them into the city and to the Crillon, their hotel. We enjoyed an early dinner after long naps then I left them to enjoy the first week of their vacation, though they had convinced me to take a week off for Christmas and to stay with them in the city when I returned later that week. I dared not ask what their other halves were doing for Christmas, and from what little I could see my poor father seemed really not to care. I think taking care of Joan had simply worn him down, like stones under a pounding surf.

When I returned to Boston the next day I found a letter from my mother, not my mother-in-law, in my mailbox. She was, it seemed, now between husbands and with the holiday fast approaching it appeared she was feeling abnormally blue. She wondered, or so she wrote, if I had plans for the holidays – and if not she wanted to spend some time together. The tone of this missive was more plea than request, and this was a first in my experience.

And this was notable to me, as this outpouring of loneliness represented a vulnerability I’d never suspected in her. She’d done well in Hollywood, really very well, and was now a regular on a popular television series and still making movies; fans adored her and reporters followed her everywhere. We’d spent a little time together when I was at Berkeley, and I found the life she’d created for herself to be an intoxicating brew of glamour and ego; it was hard to imagine a life more comfortable than what she had in Beverly Hills.

Yet within her words I felt something uncomfortably dangerous. Loneliness was not something a vulnerable soul like her’s tolerated well, and her reaching out to me was a first in my experience. Thinking about her out there suddenly by herself at this time of year felt wrong, so not knowing what else to do I called Dad. I explained my concerns and as he always did he listened attentively, carefully, then he agreed with my assessment. Go out to LA, he said, and help her get through the holidays. We could do Paris again next year.

That was, of course, the last time I ever heard his voice.

+++++

It was a few weeks after that. I had just walked into the flight dispatch office inside the TWA annex at de Gaulle when one of the dispatchers handed me a note, and I could tell by the look in the man’s eyes that bad news had come calling. 

The facts were all laid out there in concise corporate speak: Father dead. Car accident. Return DFW soonest…

The dispatcher handed me travel documents and sent me on my way, and I sat in numb silence as a series of airliners carried me homeward. A stewardess I knew sat with me from time to time on the way, held my hand as we crossed the Atlantic, and after a change of planes at JFK I fell into a restless sleep. I seemed to remember dreaming about cellophane Christmases all wrapped up in terrible cartoons full of red-nosed reindeers and foul-spirited grinches stealing the true spirit of Christmas, and then the throttles retarded and the spoilers popped up on top of the wing and there was Dealey Plaza off in the distance and I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or not. Maybe all of this was, I told myself, little more than a bad dream, and I found myself wondering what John Kennedy had thought as he looked out at this skyline before he landed at Love Field.

But then, looking out over the city I could see Highland Park over by Love Field, and then we passed over Addison airport – where I’d learned to fly once upon a time – and right then I knew this wasn’t a dream. So many familiar landmarks, yet it struck me now that there was nothing familiar about anything down there. This was terra incognita, a dangerous place that existed within a series of very bad memories, and the only good thing down there was had been laid out on a marble slab being prepared for burial. This was January, after all, and bare limbs and dead grass do not make good homecomings. 

Yet I wanted to get up and run into the warmth of a home I’d never known, but there wasn’t any such place – not now and certainly not then, and it hit me: there was nowhere like that for me, and for the first time in my life I realized I had been well and truly homeless for most of my life.

The thought made me so sick I had to laugh.

I could see DFW airport ahead and soon felt the little 727 was landing, her thrust reversers announcing our arrival to the world, but still I felt detached from this noisy routine, detached and alone – as if lost inside a never-ending dream. Watching the jet turn into the gate I realized there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for me, so after the Jetway connected I watched all the other passengers deplane before I gathered my flight bag and overcoat and made my way off the jet and up the ramp into the terminal.

And so I was quite surprised when I saw Deborah Baker waiting for me up there beside the waiting area. And even more surprised when I saw Genie, her daughter and my old girlfriend, standing by her side – and I felt myself falling back into a dream that just didn’t want to end.

+++++

As it happened, my mother-in-law had learned of her husband’s death and broken out in what could most charitably be described as genuine hysteria. Laughter for a time, then a wailing lament followed by a durable catatonia. She was now resting at Parkland, heavily sedated and jaundiced. Carol, my sister, was as always living inside herself, still warmly ensconced in Haldol and wrist restraints out at Timberlawn. This I learned from Deborah in the terminal, before I realized just how fragile was her current state of mind.

Her husband was off somewhere in Mexico, Cuernavaca she thought, with his latest mistress, and it turned out that the only person she well and truly loved – besides her two children, of course – was my father. And now she was crumbling before my eyes, hanging on to me as if I was the last remnant of that love. Which, when you get right down to it, I suppose I was.

And then there was Genie.

She looked now just as she had when we had last said our goodbyes – now almost twenty years ago. Tall, short brown hair, a face that seemed born to smile, she stood back and watched as I held onto her mother and I felt the same empathic warmth in her eyes. Well, empathy and compassion, though maybe a little pain, too. 

And yet I stood there in silence, lost in that dream, not knowing what to say.

+++++

My father had died in an accident, of sorts. He’d been playing golf, had just finished the first hole at the country club and had gone into the little field stand by Mockingbird Lane to use the restroom and get something to drink, then once again in his little Cushman golf cart he had gone over to the crossing at Mockingbird and pushed the button to get a crossing signal. When he had a green signal he started across and was immediately hit by a speeding Mustang driven by a kid who’d had his driver’s license for about a month. 

Death. Senseless Death. Pointless in the extreme. One of the most gifted thoracic surgeons in Texas run down by a kid smoking pot while he was out and about and oh, by the way, skipping school, too. My father had been alive one moment and gone a split second later; he had literally never known what hit him. Pronounced dead at the scene. Closed casket service, burial at Sparkman Hillcrest, classmates from Highland Park High and the med school in Galveston lined up in shock.

And there I was, sitting in church with Deborah and Genie by my side. Both of them holding my hands, and quite possessively too, I thought.

I stayed in town long enough to settle my father’s affairs, but in truth I had no idea what to do about Joan and Carol. My mother-in-law had been an alcoholic for so long her physicians were astonished she was still alive; my half sister Carol’s affinity for razor blades and secobarbitol  notwithstanding, we’d hardly been close but now here I was: when the music stopped I was the last man standing. In short, it had been my father’s wish that should something happen to him I be appointed guardian to both Joan and Carol – so there really wasn’t anything I could do about the situation other than see it through.

They were, you see, family, and though that was a word that did not come easily to me, I had a secret weapon, or what you might call an ace up my sleeve.

+++++

He’d always been an overtly simple man. He worked hard, never drank much and managed to go to church only when the situation absolutely called for such nonsense. He’d studied engineering in Massachusetts back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, or so he liked to say, then he’d fallen in with some truly evil people. Men who called themselves things like geologists and petroleum engineers. He’d got in on the big Texas oil boom and made some real money, then he started a company that made offshore drilling equipment and got filthy rich. Along the way he picked up a wife and in due course the man and his wife had a son.

The man was my grandfather.

And in point of fact he still was. Sitting right beside Deborah, as a matter of fact.

My grandparents had built one of the first homes in Highland Park – and my grandfather still lived there. When I was a kid, when life in my father’s house became too much for me, I’d walk over to my grandparent’s house in search of calmer shores – and it was a long walk, too. Maybe two hundred yards. I still remember how he would open the door and look down at me, and how he would nod his head knowingly and let me in; this happened with increasing frequency and after a while my grandparents had a bedroom in their house set aside just for me. They didn’t pass judgement on anything or anyone, either; I was simply welcome in their home. Come hell or high water he made pancakes every Saturday morning, and we always had lunch at their home on Christmas Day.

My grandmother died when I was ten, when I was still going to Bradfield, and my grandfather and I only grew closer after that. He taught me how to fish the spillway at Koon Kreek, and how to hunt ducks with retrievers on the Old Lake, and when I expressed an interest in learning to fly he saw to my lessons and drove me out to Addison Airport every Saturday morning for a year. He and my dad watched my first solo flight early on the morning on my sixteenth birthday and because of him I ended up with my pilot’s license before I’d even learned how to drive.

He was old now but still tough as a boot, and he stood next to me at Dad’s funeral and I think we sort of held each other up. In the aftermath, his lawyers helped decipher my father’s wishes, and his financial advisors helped modify trusts for Joan and Carol. He’d never tried to hide his feelings about Joan but Carol was, whether he liked to admit it or not, his granddaughter – and his sense of duty to her was therefore absolute.

The problem, as he saw it, was my own sense of duty. I could see that doubt written all over his face.

Carol was my sister – again, whether I wanted to admit it or not – yet in his eyes my sense of duty to her was an unknown, and my grandfather didn’t cotton to such equivocation. In other words, I needed to prove myself – to him. I needed to prove – to him – that I was worthy of my father’s trust.

But why?

Why was that important to him? And to all of us?

In a way, when I first thought about it I had to look no further than my own mother – and how she had simply left us to pursue her own dreams. And now I could tell that grandfather harbored vast reservoirs of ill will towards my mother – and perhaps to my own departure for Berkeley and then the Air Force. Guilt by association had festered in his mind. Then the distance I’d kept for almost twenty years, in effect denying the very existence of my family. Just as my mother had.

I had very little experience to fall back on, too, as my fondest recollections of family came from the year or so in high school that I spent with Genie.

And yet…Genie was here, now, and like good friends everywhere we had simply said hello and started talking right where we’d left off all those years ago. Talking with her still felt natural, and by extension I still found in Deborah a kind of surrogate mother figure. But yes, Genie was different now, too. She’d finished-up at Tulane and then went to law school there. She’d married and had a boy of her own now, though she was apparently a single mother now. For more than a while, too. She’d moved home after her separation, returned to the comfortable embrace of the familiar, and now her son, Tom, was at Bradfield – and I guess you could say he was following in our familiar footsteps.

If anything, Genie was the ideal counselor for me now. She knew me as well as anyone, and she knew my family dynamic. Best of all, she and my grandfather were close; they had been since I’d started learning to fly.

But right now I had two weeks emergency family leave, so I had two weeks to put all the pieces together, and I had two people who could help me make that happen. Yet there was one piece of the puzzle I had yet to size up.

Joan and Carol. They were the last great unknown, as in Beyond Here Thar Be Dragons.

When I spoke with Carol’s psychiatrist I was underwhelmed by her use of jargon, which I  vaguely understood: borderline personality, bi-polar, depressive disorder. In truth, I had little real idea what these things meant, but I could see the results strapped in a bed at Timberlawn. The little kid I’d known in high school was long gone now, replaced by a gaunt, gray skeleton looking thing, her wrists swaddled in gauze. Carol’s eyes, almost always wide open, looked like they were focused somewhere beyond infinity.

Her shrink wanted to try ECT, or electro-convulsive therapy, which I think everyone else called ‘shock therapy,’ but this was a controversial treatment option and, as I was Carol’s guardian, she needed my permission to proceed.

What, I asked, did she hope to accomplish? Would any meaningful change in her condition result?

And she informed me that her team had run out of ideas, and that they no longer knew quite how to proceed – beyond keeping her so medicated she was not able to move. Carol was, they implied, being warehoused, and in time her skin would begin to breakdown, her physical health would deteriorate and perhaps quite precipitously. Due to the medications she was on, organ failure was a near term possibility, and a long term certainty. ECT was an unknown frontier, and they had no clear idea how it might impact Carol’s mental condition. It was, one of the other psychiatrists told me, a Hail Mary play, a last ditch effort to change an almost certain outcome.

Genie was dubious. My grandfather was curious, but doubtful. He’d been watching Carol’s slow demise for years and he was now ready for anything that sounded even remotely hopeful. I wondered about asking Joan; she was, after all, Carol’s mother, but Deborah, Genie, and my grandfather all advised against getting her involved. When he growled that Joan was a scheming psychopath I had the good sense to move on to another subject, namely what the hell were the options if ECT didn’t work?

Genie looked at me and as kindly as she could uttered one word: hospice.

I was thunderstruck. A thirty-something year old girl with no chronic illnesses going into hospice? Seriously?

Yet Carol was being fed via a gastric tube and she was urinating via catheter. She was currently unaware of her surroundings and was developing bedsores. Her brain was broken.

And it was costing, on average, about thirty thousand dollars a month to keep her in that state; medical insurance covered the first five hundred dollars – and not one cent more – per year. Of course my father had easily afforded that sum, and the trust he’d left for her care had more than enough to cover the expense for decades, but in the end that wasn’t the point.

“Pat, if you were in your sister’s place,” Genie asked, “what would you want?”

“If I wasn’t really conscious, if I couldn’t lead a productive life or even take care of myself? Man, I don’t know. It’s easy to say ‘pull the plug’ when you’re talking about things in the abstract, but it’s a completely different thing when it’s someone you know.”

“When that person is family,” my grandfather added gently.

And I nodded. “I hate to say it, but I’m hoping ECT works. If there’s even the slightest chance of an improvement I think we have to go with her team’s advice.”

Grandfather nodded, and so did Genie. Deborah seemed to want to say something but held back.

I talked with Carol’s lead psychiatrist the next morning, and of course she had the papers she wanted signed all ready to go. I had a five o’clock flight back up to Boston that evening, so Genie ran me out to Timberlawn and helped me with all the paperwork, then she went with me to Parkland to check in on Joan, my mother-in-law.

What I remember most about that visit was the color orange. Really more a yellowish-orange. Joan’s skin was orange and the whites of her eyes were yellow tinged with orange and red. What her doctors called advanced liver disease, and she was in terminal decline that day. And sober, too, for the first time that I could recall. We talked about the accident and Dad’s funeral – which she had missed – but she really wanted to talk about her daughter, Carol. 

“I know you two were never really close,” she began, “but she is all the family you have now. Please take care of her, Pat. Please. For me, if not for your father.”

Of course I assured her I would, but I didn’t linger over Carol’s prognosis, nor did I mention ECT, while under the current circumstance a word like hospice seemed hideously cruel. We talked about a few good times we had enjoyed as a family and Joan seemed content enough with that, then she came to the heart of the matter…she had, at best, another week to live…and then, the bombshell.

“Your father told me he wanted a divorce a few months ago, and I really fell apart after that,” she said as she looked at Genie. “I don’t blame him, Pat, I really don’t. I was always too high-strung, too tightly wound…”

“I assume he knew who you were before he asked you to get married,” I replied.

“No, not really, Pat. I was always pretty good at hiding my worst impulses, and I think he was in a state of denial after he figured that out. I took advantage of him, you know? You too. I counted on you to take care of Carol even then, but you know what? Your grandfather was the only one who had me pegged from the get-go.”

“I know. He was always the great and powerful Oz, working away behind his emerald curtain to make things right for…”

“For you.”

I nodded. “I know. We’ve always leaned on each other.”

“I’m glad he’s still here for you.”

Our eyes met, and she looked at me now with just one question left to ask. “What are you not telling me, Pat?”

“Nothing important,” I said, lying through my teeth. “We just came from Timberlawn and I got the low-down. They know how to get in touch with me, so don’t worry. I won’t drop the ball.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “Will you come for my funeral?” she asked, looking away.

I cleared my throat, took her hand. “Don’t worry about all that now,” I told her.

“I’d like it if you came. There are a few papers you’ll need to sign.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Your grandfather has everything.”

“He didn’t mention that.”

“He wouldn’t. I asked him not to, until…the time was right.”

I nodded. 

“So, when will you be able to come back?” she asked.

“Next week. Probably Monday.”

She squeezed my hand and then let me go, but I did something uncharacteristic just then – I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead – then I turned and left the room, with a surprised Genie hastily bringing up the rear. When she caught up to me at the elevators I was trying to stifle the tears that had suddenly come calling, and I think she was more surprised than I was.

 So Genie ran me out to DFW, but as we were early she went in with me and we sat in a little restaurant – but it wasn’t too hard to tell she had a few important things she wanted to talk about, too.

“How come you never married,” Genie asked as I looked over the menu. 

And I shrugged. “I don’t know, Genie. Maybe I never really saw marriage as something I wanted to do.”

“I can’t blame you. Not with Joan terrorizing the two of you.”

“Terrorizing?” I asked. “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”

She shook her head. “No, not in the least. My mother always called her a rattlesnake…”

I laughed at that, but I’d felt the same more than once. 

“I think that’s why you were always over at our house, Pat. Just getting away from her.”

Of course I had been, and there’d never been any real reason to hide the fact – now or then. “Survival instinct, I guess,” I just managed to say, but I was thinking of Joan again – and trying to reconcile the painful cascades of memory with who and what I had just seen at Parkland. Worse, I knew now that the only person who might have possibly prevented Carol from taking the full brunt of Joan’s tortured madness…was me.

“Tom likes you,” she said, out of the blue.

And I looked at her, and at the meaning behind those words. “He seems happy.”

“His father is working in Norway most of the time now, but he’s shown little interest in being a father.”

“Oh?” Now I was wondering when she was going to get to the point.

“Tom needs a father,” she sighed.

I nodded. “Who’d you have in mind, Genie?”

“I’ve dated a few men, Pat, but Tom has never liked any of them. He likes you.”

“So, who’s calling the shots?”

“Pat, I’ve been in love with you since kindergarten, and he’s heard me talking about you all his life. And let’s face it…you’re a pilot and what little boy isn’t going to be…”

I held up a hand. “Genie, all that happened a lifetime ago. You and me…I haven’t seen you in, what? Almost twenty years…”

“And I’m still in love with you, Pat. What’s more, I’m pretty sure you still love me.”

“Genie, look…”

“Pat, you just lost your father. Joan is dying and now you’ve got Carol to deal with. I know your grandfather is a great guy, but you really don’t need to be alone right now. At least when you come home.”

I nodded. “This isn’t home, Genie. Not anymore.”

“Look, all I’m saying is let’s give us a chance. When you come back, could we spend some time together? Not as friends, but as, well…more than friends?”

I nodded. But I looked away, not sure how I felt about all this – only that the whole day was beginning to feel a little like an ambush. “It’s a lot to take in,” I sighed.

“I know. The past two weeks have been a nightmare. Just give it some thought, would you?”

We talked about little things after that, over salads and iced tea. About how Bradfield had changed since we’d been students there, and about all the changes the country club had in the works; typical Highland Park stuff, I guess. All the things I’d turned my back on. All the things I had no interest in. We picked at our food like we picked our way through the minefield of my denials – slowly and carefully – at least until it was time to head to the gate, but by then she’d worked up enough courage to try one more shot across the bow.

“God knows you had reason enough to run, Pat, but don’t you think it’s time to stop?”

I felt helpless, defeated. Maybe I even felt alone as I shrugged. “You know, Genie, believe it or not I’m actually kind of happy. I’m doing what I want…”

“And you’re running into a dead end,” she countered. “One day you’re going to take a look around and realize you’re all alone, and it didn’t have to be that way.”

Her words felt heavy, heavy and burdensome.

“Will you at least call me when you’re coming? I’d like to meet you here?”

“Of course,” I said. “Like I said, next Monday. I’ll call you with the flight number as soon as I have it.”

She smiled then. A hopeful smile, but her eyes were full of doubt. I suppose because my words didn’t quite ring true. We hugged before I walked down the Jetway, and the more I walked the lighter I felt, and pretty soon I felt like running.

+++++

A few days passed and I found myself walking along the banks of the Seine, looking across still waters at Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, as ever in total awe. I’d never been a particularly religious sort, yet from time to time I sought out the solitude of these old medieval sanctuaries, and while I didn’t know why, or even care how this came about, I enjoyed the timelessness I felt inside these places. And it seemed today was going to be such a day. 

I wandered over to an old favorite, to the Église Saint-Séverin, and walked inside, found an empty pew and sat in a pool of kaleidoscopic light. The stained glass in the main sanctuary was mesmerizing, and as I sat there in the light thoughts of my father came to me slowly. Then came the raging torrent of responsibilities and duties that waited for my return. Joan and Carol. Genie and Tom, and of yes, Deborah, too. And my grandfather, patiently waiting for me to come to my senses and come home…

“Well, I’ll say one thing, Pat. I never expected to see you walk into a church.”

I knew that voice, and it certainly wasn’t God’s.

I turned to see not an omnipotent old man in flowing gowns but a stewardess I’d known for years, and known rather well. Ellen. Ellen McGovern. Sweet kid. Kind of a ‘fresh off the farm’ midwest vibe and really, really good looking, too. Every now and then we had the same flight so we usually got caught up on those layovers, but it hadn’t been physical between us in a while; once she’d figured out I wasn’t the serious type she’d moved on to steadier, greener pastures.

So I smiled at her and nodded at the door, then got up to leave. Once out in the open she took my arm and leaned into me. “I heard about your dad. You doin’ okay?”

“I’m not sure,” I said with a grin. “I was about to ask God and then there you were…”

She gave my arm a squeeze as we walked back towards the Seine. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked. “It’s freezing out!”

“I think it’s more like fifty degrees. At least that’s what I remember from the forecast. So, what are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

“Following you.”

“Really?”

“No, not really, but I was showing a couple of the new girls the sights and we saw you.”

“And you just dumped them?”

“No, they’re around the corner at the crepe place.”

“That sounds good.”

“Come join us.”

So I did. 

Two old hands and the three new girls made room for Ellen and I and we shot the breeze for an hour, then I led them all on a tour of Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame, glad that, once upon a time, I’d taken several electives on medieval art and architecture and could finally put all that knowledge to good use. An afternoon later we made our way to the Marriott and we all had dinner together, and Ellen thanked me for being such a good sport before she made her way up to her room.

I heard a knock on my door an hour later, but not really wanting to be more confused than I already was I feigned sleep, then tossed and turned the rest of the night. 

In the dispatch office bright and early the next morning the sympathetic man handed me another note, this one indicating that Joan had passed away a few hours earlier – I assume while I was out chaperoning stewardesses around the city. Another first officer had been called in to work my flight to Boston and I would, therefore, be flying back to Boston in the cabin, connecting with a flight to Dallas from Logan. I called Genie and left the flight number on her answering machine, and wondered what it all meant.

So Ellen found me in seat 1A when she boarded with her brood, and I filled her in on recent events, told her I was back on family leave and en route to Dallas once again. I was in uniform so on best corporate behavior; she brought me orange juice and handed me a hot towelette. I tried to stay interested as we taxied and took off but the truth of my life was slowly dawning on me.

I was looking forward to seeing Genie. To talking with my grandfather. And I suddenly felt a surge of energy when I thought about the things I might do to help Carol along, because truly, if there was anyone capable of helping her fight her demons, it was probably me. We had, when all was said and done, suffered in silence together, through all of Joan’s abominations.

What was it they called this? Survivors guilt? I had been able to run to my grandfather’s house when things got bad, which looking back on it now meant I’d left Carol to take the brunt of it in my absence. Why had I done that? Maybe because she was ‘just’ my half sister I’d never developed the empathy I needed to protect her? Or maybe I’d just been born stronger and more resilient but had mistakenly assumed she could take care of herself? Yet what was the point in laying blame anywhere now? Assigning some half-baked idea of blame wasn’t going to help Carol reconcile her past, only compassionate support would help her now.

I thought about the little church of Saint-Séverin. The vast pools of faceted light cast by walls of stained glass, the silence within her cold stone sanctuary, and I guess I was really thinking about faith and how that spark had always eluded me. To me, faith stood in stark opposition to observable truth, and my engineers’ mind had always sought certainty – and never the vagaries of the spirit. And yet I almost instinctively sought out such places as Saint-Séverin when I needed a quiet place to think.

Looking out over the Atlantic, looking down at low scudding cumulus clouds and the shadows they cast on the blue-gray sea, I wanted to see something beyond the obvious. I wanted to see allegory and symbolism, not the stark reality of the hydrologic cycle, but my mind hadn’t been wired that way. Then I saw another airliner, below and a little to the left of our track, and I could see that it was a Swissair DC-10 and probably headed to Boston. We flew along in formation like two migrating birds above the clouds.

Ellen brought me lunch and sat with me for a while after the meal service was cleared, and apparently she still wanted to talk.

“How’re you doing?” she opened.

“I’m not really sure. Conflicted, I think.”

“You look so lonely sitting here.”

I nodded. “I think the past few weeks, well, I’ve never felt more alone. I don’t think I was ever really willing to admit how much my father meant to me, yet I’m coming to realize that his dedication to medicine was our family’s undoing, and I don’t know how to reconcile that.”

“Do you think he was aware of what was happening?”

I shrugged. “He was smart and he was perceptive so I have to think he was.”

“And yet he didn’t intervene?”

“He got Carol help, but I think by then the damage had been done. Beyond that, I think he had affairs just so he could stay away from Joan. He played golf, he went hunting or fishing…”

“Did he drink a lot?”

“At one point, yeah. After I went off to college he always seemed pretty bent when I called, but not so much the past few years. I think he was going to divorce Joan and marry again, and I think that helped pull him away from booze.”

“Do you know who he was in love with?”

I nodded. “Old friend. They’d known each other since…well, they were in grade school together.”

“So Joan wasn’t your mother, right?”

“Yup. Dorothy Mahoney is my mother.”

“The actress? Really?”

“Really.”

“Now that you mention it I can see the resemblance. You have her legs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

“Do you talk with her much.”

“Only when she needs me. Which so far has been every five years or so.”

“I guess I can see why marriage doesn’t really ring your bell.”

I nodded. “Marriage, to me, is a battlefield – where no prisoners are taken and no one survives intact.”

“You know, there was a point when I wanted you so much, when I wanted you to ask me to marry you…”

“I’m sorry I let you down.”

“That’s just it, Pat. You didn’t let me down. You were always pretty clear about what kind of future you wanted.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t trust people, Pat. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you don’t trust love.”

“Maybe. But I also don’t like living by myself,” I sighed. “How’s that for a contradiction.”

“That’s a whopper, but why do you have to live alone?”

“I guess all that’s frowned on, you know?”

“Well, maybe you could live with someone for a while, figure out if marriage is right for you?”

I sighed. “It always ends in marriage, doesn’t it? It’s like a moral imperative…”

“Maybe it is,” Ellen added.

“Tell me something, would you? What’s the point of marriage if you don’t want kids?”

“Commitment, I guess. Shared struggle to reach a goal? To take care of one another and maybe just have someone to laugh at your corny jokes and a shoulder to lean on when things go wrong…?”

“You need a piece of paper for that?”

“No, not really, but Pat, do you not want kids of your own?”

That was the crux of the matter, really, and she’d come to the point easily enough.

“Or are you afraid you’d create the same misery for your own kids,” she added.

I looked down – and I think I nodded in defeat. “That would kill me,” I whispered.

“So don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t let that happen; don’t create the same environment your parents did. Find the right girl and hold on tight, be there for your kids and help them on their way. Just because your parents messed up doesn’t mean you will too.”

But that argument always came full circle again, didn’t it? Faith in the unknown versus the reality of cold, hard truth. The scattered light of stained glass or shadows passing on the sea below. “Is it really that simple, Ellen?”

“I don’t know, but I’m willing to try if you are.” I knew she was teasing me just a little and that she really wasn’t serious, but then she took my hand and gave it a little squeeze before she went off to deal with a passenger.

Maybe my thinking really was caught in a rut. Or maybe I simply couldn’t imagine a life with a wife and kids because deep down I really never really wanted to live that way.

I watched the spoilers on the wing when they deployed, felt the subtle transition to our gentle descent, but this time I felt anxious little butterflies of uncertainty were circling in my gut. Only not about Ellen.

Genie was on my mind. Hell, she’d always been on my mind, all the way back to Mrs. Murphy’s first grade class. I’d always looked at her when she came into the classroom, even then. The same butterflies visited me on those mornings. We were just little kids but I was drawn to her like a moth to the flame and something was once again pulling me towards her. Momentum? Some weird kind of reverse destiny – like you can never ever really truly walk away from your past? Instead, we wear our past all our lives, like turtles wear their shells.

Genie was, like me, tall. I was a lot taller than all my classmates, but she was the tallest girl at Bradfield, too. She had a face that reminded everyone of that girl on TV, the freckle faced girl that played The Flying Nun. The same big smile, open, friendly eyes, brown hair cut real short, like Maria in The Sound of Music only Genie’s was shiny brown. By third grade we always sat together in the school cafeteria during lunch, and almost every day we walked home from school together – which explains the how and the why of Deborah becoming like what a real mother was supposed to be like. So, hadn’t Genie – in a way – become more like a sister to me?

By the time I was in sixth grade, like by the time I was eleven years old, I was taking care of Carol when she came home from school because Joan was always at the country club playing cards and getting smashed. And I don’t know how many times Genie came home to help. Some nights Carol and I walked over to Genie’s and had dinner there.

So, where was Dad during all this?

After surgery and rounds he was at the club playing golf. Cocktails with friends in the nineteenth hole then more cocktails with Joan in the main lounge that overlooked a large, four hole putting green. By the time they made it home Joan was primed and ready for combat and she’d start in on Dad, in a heartbreaking instant turning into a world class bully. After a half hour of that Carol and I could hear him thundering out the door and getting into his car and taking off for God knows where. When I finally learned he had a mistress waiting in the wings I could hardly blame him.

But as soon as he was out the door the real fun began.

Joan would come in to our rooms and tortures us for a while, the pure emotional abuse of a sadistic bully. She’d usually have a few more drinks then pass out in the living room, and that was when Carol and I could finally get some sleep. The thing is, this was our routine. It happened every night.

So when I looked at Carol I was looking at a fellow survivor, yet I was also looking at my kid sister, a defenseless little girl who’d always counted on me to take some of the heat from Joan. When I left for college Carol lost what little protection she’d had, and now she was coming apart at the seams. If that was my fault, was I supposed to be her caretaker for the rest of her life?

But now I was, and quite literally would be, her caretaker – for the rest of her life. And now…I had to make some very painful decisions on her behalf if she didn’t snap out of it, if these ECT treatments proved fruitless.

But then the Tri-Star landed and her thrust reversers pulled me back into the present. I had a tight connection so I smiled at Ellen before I dashed through customs and over to the domestic terminal to hop a ride down to DFW, yet I felt conflicted as I ran from one terminal to the next. Genie and Carol, two sides of an old coin, dominated my thoughts – which did their best to keep me company on the next three hour flight.

Genie was, of course, waiting for me at the head of the Jetway in Dallas, and she held me and kissed me just like all the other husbands and wives were doing. So natural, like falling from one life to another without so much as a passing thought. As we drove back into the city she told me about all the arrangements she’d made; the service for Joan and the actual funeral – all followed by a small get together with some of my parents closest friends at the country club. A perfect Highland Park wedding – or funeral – but really…what’s different but the passage of time?

And Tom, Genie’s son, was waiting for us at the house. My father’s house. Doing his homework, a book report on Tom Sawyer, and I thought ‘How appropriate’ – given the circumstances.

I carried my flight bag and a small duffel to my old bedroom – because I absolutely, positively wasn’t going to sleep in my parent’s bed – and Tom followed me and then waited for me to put my things away. My room looked exactly as it had at the end of my senior year at Highland Park High, which is to say that there were shelves and bookcases loaded down with all the model airplanes I’d built – probably starting somewhere in second grade – so a good ten years worth of plastic and diligently applied paint and decals.

And Tom was fascinated.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he started a bit hesitantly when I looked up at him, “but I came in and looked at your airplanes.”

“No. I don’t mind. You interested in building models?”

He nodded solemnly, as I guess he was still pretty shy, even for a nine year old.

“So, what have you built so far?”

And Tom shrugged. A shrug that represented long, lonely nights tossing and turning as daydreams came and went unfulfilled. His shrug represented all the things he wanted to do but hadn’t been able to…yet. He had all the signs of a kid caught in the tug-of-war of a disintegrating marriage; divided loyalties; not knowing who to believe, or even what to believe, as his parents used him to get at one another. The boy needed a father, desperately, and though it was easy enough to see what Genie had in mind I felt for him.

I still had a few kits in my closet, a couple of nice Tamiya 1/48^th scale Navy jets, and I pulled them down and watched his eyes light up when he saw an A-7 Corsair II. I pulled that one from the stack and put it on my desk and opened it up, and Tom picked up the rows and rows of pieces and parts and looked at them almost reverentially…

“Look over the instructions,” I said gently, “and tell me what you think.”

I turned and saw Genie leaning in the doorway, taking us in with her all-knowing, appreciative eyes, but then she looked over at me and smiled before she turned and walked off to the kitchen. She was making herself right at home now, cooking up a storm because, well, she was in her comfort zone. I assumed it had been a long time since she’d had an appreciative husband around the house and, well, we had a certain history, didn’t we?

Then Tom looked over at me and he unflinchingly asked the one question I’d not expected: “Could you teach me to fly?” he asked.

So I looked him in the eye and took a quick measure of his sincerity. “You interested in that?”

He nodded. “Every time we go somewhere. There’s something magic about flying.”

I nodded. “There is. So tell me, subtract 90 from 360. What do you get?”

He thought for a moment then replied: “270,” he said – and quite confidently, too.

“Add 65 to 95.”

“160.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yup.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “now what about that kit?”

“I think I’d need help with painting it, but it doesn’t look all that bad.”

“Ever used an airbrush?”

“A what?”

I smiled and shook my head. I’d put away my airbrush equipment years ago and had no idea if it would still work, but Genie called out from the kitchen just then – “Dinner’s ready!” – and I couldn’t help but hear her mother on a distant afternoon and I drifted along on my memories for a moment.

“Well,” I finally said, breaking free of the past, “come on, Tom. I guess your mom has other plans for us right now.”

We ate spaghetti and garlic bread and I fielded a barrage of questions from Tom about flying lessons, at least until my jet-lag hit – and I went down hard after that. When I woke early in the morning and found Tom asleep in Carol’s bedroom and Genie down for the count in my parent’s bed, and I looked at her while she slept and wondered why all this felt so natural. Like this was the way it should have gone down twenty years earlier, and standing there I went from feeling a kind of contented bliss to emotionally disoriented, like Time was this flexible, yielding thing that could entertain two such wildly disparate emotions in my mind.

I’d had my eight hours so went to the kitchen and was not exactly surprised to see that the ‘fridge had been completely stocked, and I stood their, exasperated and yet full of wonder, in awe of Genie’s mastery of the finest detail. She would have been perfect as Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff when he was laying out Operation Overlord, and I felt certain the war could have been shortened by at least a year if she had been organizing the invasion of Europe.

I called my grandfather at 0500 because I knew he’d have been up for at least an hour by then, and that he’d have his morning calisthenics out of the way already, so I asked him to come over and help me whip up a bunch of pancakes for Genie and Tom. Fifteen minutes later and with his excitement barely contained, he was whipping up batter while I was putting the bacon in the oven, then whisking eggs and dicing onions and green peppers for a huge scramble. When the bacon began doing it’s job – filling the house with that eternally seductive aroma – and thereby waking Tom and Genie – the old man and I began ladling out hotcakes on the griddle while Genie set the table and poured glasses of fresh squeezed OJ.

And I could see she was in seventh Heaven, that her version of the universe was coming together nicely – that the cosmic tumblers were all falling into place. Like any other nine year old, Tom dragged his ass into the kitchen still rubbing sleep from his eyes, but the prospect of a hot breakfast made by someone other than his mother snapped him to full attention. Full of unasked questions, he sat there staring in utter disbelief at my grandfather, and I even think I understood his confusion. It was beyond surreal that any old man could move with such certainty and speed and, as long as his hearing aids were set correctly, carry on multiple conversations with any and everyone in the room. Poor Grandfather was still as sharp as a tack and Tom just couldn’t relate to that.

And soon the Old Man and I laid out a nice forty-thousand calorie breakfast, just what we needed to get us through the day ahead. Tom plowed through five pancakes and asked for more, so the Old Man went to the griddle and whipped-up another batch of perfect flap-jacks.

When Genie drove Tom over to Bradfield the Old Man got down to business.

“Joan’s father and grandfather had some serious money,” he began, “and it’s parked over at Northern Trust. After consulting with her attorneys she decided to split the trust in two, seventy-five percent to you, and twenty-five to Carol, I think to take care of her medical costs, and assuming you would have no objections I went ahead and consolidated your new shares with your father’s trust…”

I shrugged. I knew the money was there, somewhere, but refused to touch it, and had continued living on my salary from TWA. I just looked at the Old Man and shrugged.

“Look, I know you don’t give a damn about these things, but Joan’s father made some good money, her grandfather even more, and she inherited it all. With what your father left you, well, you aren’t exactly poor.”

“And I told you…”

“I know what you told me, Pat. Now you’re going to need to tell me what your plans are for the foreseeable future.”

“I thought I’d been clear with you about that. I’m going to fly and I’m going to keep living in my apartment in Boston. I have no plans beyond that.”

“Pat, do you even own an automobile?”

“No. I don’t need one. I can ride the T anywhere I want to go.”

“What are you going to do with this house? And if I may, do you have any intentions concerning Genie?”

“Why would I sell this place?”

“Because it’s a shame to let it sit her and rot. And what about Genie?”

“Paw-paw, last I heard she was still married…”

“Divorce is inevitable.”

“You’ll excuse me, but you sure seem particularly well informed about things.”

“Well, you’ll excuse me, but in case it’s slipped your attention, I ain’t exactly getting any younger and I’ve got plans of my own to tend to. And, in case that too has slipped your mind, you figure into those plans as well, so you’ll pardon my curiosity but I kind of need to know what you have in mind.”

“You mind if I ask what you and Genie have cooked up for me, or is that question none of my business?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Pat.”

I knew that look, the glare he was sending my way just then. You didn’t mess around with the Old Man when he sent that one your way. My dad had taught me that much…

I sighed, but I didn’t dare look away – because the Old Man hated human weakness and frailty of any sort. “You know my position on marriage,” he snarled. “Maybe it’s time you changed your mind about living your life like some kind of monk. It ain’t natural, Pat. Your life won’t ever be complete without the responsibility that comes with bringing up a family and taking care of them. That’s what defines a man, in case no one told you.”

“That thought has been on my mind a lot recently,” I sighed.

“And?”

“I think about destiny, too. Growing up, I always thought that Genie was my destiny, and then…”

“And then California came calling – but your mother was behind all that. Then that lark in the Air Force. Yes, yes, I know that story all too well.”

“Paw-paw, in case you’ve forgotten, Genie met the man she thought was her destiny – and it wasn’t me…”

“Because she thought you’d walked out of her life – all our lives, really – and she didn’t know what else to do. She knew she wanted a family…”

“Gee, I wonder where she got that idea?” I said.

“That was a dumb-ass thing to say, Pat, and don’t you dare talk to that woman like that…not while I’m still around. I hear about that and I’ll come kick your ass from one end of the Commons to the other.”

And he could probably still do it, too. “I hear you,” I sighed.

The garage door opened and Genie walked into the kitchen, stopping short when she saw the piles of papers spread out on the kitchen table. “Did I come at a bad time?” she asked.

“No, not at all,” my grandfather said – in that perpetually chipper, matter of fact way of his. “Pat’s just got to sign a few things. What time is the service?”

“Eleven,” she replied. “Would you like us to pick you up? It’s on the way?”

“Thanks, that would be nice. Say Pat, bring your father’s car, if the damn thing’ll start. It needs to be driven some while you’re still in town.”

Of course all this felt like one blistering insinuation after another. I could see that the lawn care had slipped and that there were leaves in the gutters, things my father would have never allowed. And there were three cars in the garage; his two Jaguars and Joan’s Cadillac. Those Jags were an affectation of his, an expression of his love for all things British; he had a new XJ-12 as well as an older XK-E, an inline six model, but it was a ragtop– though I’m not sure the top had ever been raised to close off the cockpit. That car…oh how he’d doted on the thing…and how many times had we waxed it together?

But after I’d dressed I went out to the garage and noted battery chargers had been hooked up to both his cars, and only my grandfather would have thought to do that. The XJ started easily and burbled to life, and after I backed her out I went around and opened the door for Genie.

“It still smells like your father,” she sighed, her eyes closed as her senses roamed. “God, I miss him.”

“I know the feeling,” I said as I settled in and adjusted the mirrors, yet the truth is I felt like I was on autopilot, going through the motions while lingering memories beat the air over my head. It was like the last thing I wanted to do right now was rock the boat – because if only one thing was apparent right now it was my grandfather’s agenda. He wanted me home and he wanted me married to Genie. He wanted me taking care of that boy, opting to take over my father’s memberships at the country club and Koon Kreek, and it all seemed like he wanted me to slide into my father’s life because, I was beginning to see, he just couldn’t admit that his son was gone. I needed to step in to validate the future he had always considered a done deal, the future he’d imagined it ought to be. And would have been but for kid in a Mustang.

Grandfather lived at most about 200 yards away, on Bordeaux, in the same house he’d built when the developers of the newly incorporated Highland Park had first offered lots for sale. I pulled into his driveway and he walked out the same front door I’d knocked on, stopping once to check the sky on his way out to the car. No doubt he’d checked the weather reports before getting dressed, chosen what coat to wear while standing graveside, because that was the way you did things. In his world you thought things through. Everything. All the time. Certainty created precision; uncertainty bred chaos. He’d drilled that into my father’s head, and my father had done the same to me. Now it was my turn to pass on the distillate of his being, to pass on the secret of his success. Precision: Good. Uncertainty: Bad.

And hadn’t I done that my whole life. Hadn’t I studied that way? Wasn’t that why my grades were always the best in my class, whatever class it happened to be? Take precise notes. Highlight the text in precise detail. Avoid uncertainty. Avoid chaos. Come out on top?

I drove, precisely, to Lovers Lane Methodist. I acknowledged all my parent’s friends with a precise nod. I delivered a carefully constructed eulogy with concise precision, including only the highlights and omitting all of Joan’s transparently chaotic flaws. I was, as precisely as I could be, the dutiful son, and here I was with precisely the right woman hanging onto my arm, in effect validating everyone’s worldview of my place in their lives.

After the burial and during the reception at the country club I was stunned by how many of my parent’s friends came by to say how good Genie and I looked together, and more than a couple stated flatly that we had belonged together from the beginning. And every time I heard that blather I thought I could feel my head swelling up, getting ready to explode.

“You’ll be moving back to Dallas soon?” one said, and it was a proclamation, not a question.

I was still the class valedictorian, the star wide receiver that made All State my senior year. 

“And just why did you leave?”

“Good to see you’ve finally come to your senses.”

And my favorite: “Your father would be so proud.”

At one point I walked over to the small dining room that overlooked the swimming pool and I looked down into the water, saw a few forlorn leaves gathered in the deep end, and I envied their silence. the chaos of their rotting in the bottom of a swimming pool.

True to form, I’d put up my perfectly cleaned airbrush so when I took it out a few days later the damn thing worked flawlessly. Tom and I had driven in the XK-E out to Halls Hobby Shop and picked up new paint and a few tools, and we spent Saturday working together on that model of the A-7, and I found myself talking just as my father had. Careful encouragement. Positive criticism. Always in service of the ideal idea: precision over uncertainty. Take your time and do it right the first time.

Becoming my father came to me naturally, so naturally, and the thought made me sick to my stomach.

+++++

I spent one morning – alone – out at Timberlawn, talking with Carol’s psychiatrist as well as the internist charged with her rather complicated medical care. Carol had been through two ECT treatments so far, and she seemed lucid for a few hours after each but had soon slipped back into her hallucinatory existence. Her psychiatrist proposed two more treatments, to see if the latent intervals of lucidity increased, and if so to continue with four more treatments over the next two weeks.

“And if she doesn’t improve?” I asked.

“That will be up to you, but as we discussed last time you might want to consider hospice care.”

“When is her next treatment. I’d like to talk to her just after.”

“Tomorrow morning. She should be out of anesthesia by ten or so.” 

So I was there at ten or so the next morning, and Carol and I talked for the first time in twenty years, and we started where we had left off. She was with me again, clear as could be, and I explained what was happening and why I was there.

“I can’t go back there, Pat. You have no idea…”

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know,” I said, and as empathetically as I could. “What’s it like? When you go there?”

“Flames. I’m surrounded by flames and my skin is burning and then the demons come. They rip away my flesh and push me deeper into the fire…”

“And that’s…”

“That’s all I can see or hear, Pat. Don’t make me go back there…”

Those words clawed at my throat, broke my heart. “You don’t have to go back, Carol. Come, stay with me, let me help you fight them…”

And yet two hours later she slid back into the flames, began writhing in agony and screaming as her tormenters returned. Thorazine was administered and within a few minutes she was back in her stupor, but her psychiatrist explained these medicines only quelled the external dimensions. Whatever it was tormenting her continued to do so even now.

“Is this unusual?” I asked.

“Yes, fairly. Thorazine usually stops almost all hallucinations, but not in all patients, and certainly not in your sister’s case.”

“So she gets no relief?”

“That’s correct. She’s in, for all intents and purposes, Hell, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. Inside her hallucination, she’s roasting in Hell while constantly being attacked by demons, and I’ve watched these attacks, so to speak, on an EEG – even when she’s sedated on Thorazine. It is a completely unacceptable outcome.”

“Do you know what caused this?”

The physician shrugged off the question. “Genetics? Upbringing? We just don’t know yet, and we don’t have the tools we need to find out the why or the how of such things. This woman, her mother? I can say she must have been a monster. A complete monster.”

“Cobra,” I whispered.

“What’s that?”

“I called her a cobra once, when I was about fifteen. She slapped me senseless.”

“What else do you recall?”

I shrugged. “The list is endless, but if I could come up with one common denominator I’d say that Joan was trying to destroy everything my father stood for, everything he valued, and the more she drank the more violent she became.”

“She beat you too?”

“Both of us, yes.”

“You’ll excuse my asking, but did she molest you?”

I looked away, but I nodded.

“May I ask how?”

“She’d bully my dad until he’d had enough, and after he left she came to my room. She’d crawl all over me and play with it, usually with her hands but sometimes using her mouth. She’d sit on me and piss on me and then tell my father I was still wetting the bed, telling him to spank me…”

“Did he?”

“No. I think he knew something was wrong, but I don’t think he ever really put all of the pieces of the puzzle together…”

“These pieces? They were pretty big, too big I think for a physician to ignore.”

“Maybe.”

“Have you ever considered the possibility that your father molested your sister?”

“No. And I’d say that was an impossibility.”

“Why?”

“Because he was hardly ever home. Joan ran him off – almost every night.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t really know, not with any certainty, but I always suspected he kept a mistress.”

“What about after you left for college?”

I froze. From the inside out. “Dad wasn’t the type.”

“You know this with certainty?”

I nodded.

“Then the origins of her hallucinations will remain a mystery. Joan was not your biological mother, correct?”

I nodded again. “That’s right.”

“Who raised you?”

I shrugged. “My grandparents, my girlfriend’s mother, but mostly my father. I always thought my grandparents knew something was going on…”

“Do you trust women?” the psychiatrist asked, out of the blue.

I looked at the shrink and nodded. “I never considered that Joan was normal. My grandmother was a saint, and so too was my girlfriend’s mother. Hell, for that matter my girlfriend was too.”

“But you’ve kept your distance from women, haven’t you? Maybe you find it hard to commit to a relationship?”

“I’ve always considered myself a confirmed bachelor.”

“I think if I was in your position I would too.”

“So, you think…”

“I think I am not your physician, Mr. Healey. What I know of you and your family is a distortion, or a series of distortions your sister conveyed, so I would not dare to presume anything at this point. I am curious, however. What happened to this girlfriend you mention? The saintly one?”

“Long story, but the short version is she’s still out there, waiting for me to come to my senses.”

“What an interesting way of putting things. What do you think is going to happen next?”

“I have no idea.”

The psychiatrist looked at me and smiled. “Oh, but of course you do. You’re the only one that does. You just have to know where to look.” But then the shrink turned and faced me, and just then she pointed right at my heart. “Life is a hall of mirrors, Mr. Healey, and from time to time as we walk along we think we catch a fleeting glimpse of reality, but make no mistake – what we see is an illusion, and there is no place we can hide from that one simple truth.”

And for a moment, in a brief flash of time, I felt the wind in my hair and saw dead autumn leaves skittering alongside the Seine before they fell into the black water. I looked up in time to see Sainte Chapelle covered in blood, my blood, and the sky beyond was turning crimson and gold as flame-filled clouds, writhing in my sister’s eternal agony, marched across an unsuspecting Earth.

+++++

“You look pale,” Genie said as she walked into my father’s house. Tom was trailing along at a discrete distance, his eyes cast down and looking very put upon. It was so obvious now, too. The boy missed his father and didn’t understand what had happened to his life.

‘Welcome to the club, kid,’ I said inwardly. The face of the country was rapidly inverting as no-fault divorce and legions of freshly minted lawyers scoured the land in search of a new clientele, and kids like Tom were the faceless, nameless victims of this latest inversion of family life.

“Bad day,” I grumbled.

“Carol?” Genie asked, though the question was hardly necessary.

“I picked up a bunch of steaks for dinner,” I said, changing the subject.

“A bunch? You must be hungry.”

“I asked the Old Man to drop by.”

“Are we intruding?” she asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“Tom,” she said, “why don’t you get started on your homework.”

The boy nodded and put his book bag down on the floor next to the kitchen table, then he pulled out a copy to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and got to work. I drifted back to Bradfield, to Mrs. Dunsworth’s fourth grade class, and I remembered making my way through the same book on my way to writing my very first book report. I tried to reconcile that experience with the sight of this kid following down the very same path, yet it was impossible to forget the shrink’s comments about a hall of mirrors – and the impossible vision that followed.

“Pat, what’s wrong?” Genie said, her voice shaking just a little.

“I’ve got to go back out there in the morning, but I’m a little scared…”

“Scared? You?”

“The implications of these treatments failing…well, it really became crystal clear today.”

She came over and took my hands in hers, but she as quickly gasped: “Pat…your hands are like ice!”

I remember nodding, and trying to smile just a little, but I was lost inside my very own hall of mirrors. “I told you I felt scared.”

“You feel up to cooking?”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’ll handle the grill if you can put together a salad.”

“How ‘bout a spinach soufflé?”

“Perfect,” I added, knowing the freezer was full of Dad’s favorite side dish, little orange boxes of Stouffer’s spinach soufflé – which was his side of choice when grilling steaks out back – and the thought that Genie knew that left me reeling. “Did Dad stay over at your house often?”

She hesitated, but then she relented. “More and more the past year or so.”

“How’s your mom?”

Genie shook her head. “Not good. She went down after you left last time; it was like losing him all over again.”

I nodded, felt sick to my stomach. Genie had been well on her way to becoming my stepsister, and wouldn’t that have been just ducky – best laid plans and all that nonsense. I didn’t really know what to say so went out back to get the Hasty-Bake ready for duty, filling the charcoal tray just like father      did, getting the coals just so then using the same wire brush to clean off the stainless steel grates. Back to the kitchen to make his marinade – equal parts ketchup and mustard, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a little squeeze of anchovy paste and half a lime. Drop in the ribeyes and let them soak it all in before dropping them on a bed of 500 degree coals.

“Salads ready,” Genie called a bit later, and I pulled the steaks from the grill and closed the dampers before I carried them into the house. Both my grandfather and Deborah were sitting at the table, lost in conversation while Tom sat there still trying to figure out what the Hell was going on with his life. I said my hellos, but after I put the platter on the table I walked over and gave Deborah a huge, bone-crushing hug – if only because I was genuinely glad to see her right now – then I blushed and took my seat.

Genie fixed our plates and passed them around – just like she always had twenty years ago, only at her house. Grandfather said a prayer while Tom and I exchanged knowing smirks – just like my father and I always had – at this very table. We made small talk, anything really that would keep Carol and all her problems away for a few more hours…

“You ought to take the XK-E out for a run while you’re here,” Grandfather said.

I nodded. “Not sure I could stand the attention.”

The roadster was fire engine red with a black interior, and everywhere you went in the damn thing people stopped what they were doing and drooled.

“Better check the oil first, if you do,” he added – because like all Jags the engine leaked oil 24/7.

But I had checked her fluids already. And yes, after checking the garage floor I confirmed the oil was down almost a quart. “Maybe I’ll take it out tomorrow,” I sighed, if only because I hated crawling into the driver’s seat, contorting my frame over the wide sill and under the oak steering wheel, but a car like that needed to be driven. Hell, it screamed to be driven – and fast – but oddly enough it wasn’t a great car. It was sexy as hell, but while smooth the inline six lacked power, and Dad’s XJ handled about as well on a mountain road.

“How was Carol?” he asked, breaking the spell.

I shook my head. “We’ll know more tomorrow,” I managed to say before I asked Genie for some more grub.

Then I cleared the table and Genie got the dishes loaded in the washer – and soon enough she came over and asked if it would be okay if she and Tom slept over again.

“Why don’t you ask Tom,” I replied. “He seems a little out of it right now, like maybe he’s a little confused about where things stand.”

Her jaw tightened but she just caught herself, then she smiled and nodded as this setback became too obvious to ignore.

A half hour later I was alone again.

It was time, I realized as I looked at this dated appliances in the kitchen, to sell this mausoleum. It was time to move on. From everything.

+++++

When Carol failed to come out from under the spell of her hallucinations after her fifth treatment, I met with her treatment team in a small conference room, and I could see this latest defeat in their eyes.

“We’re back to square one,” Amy Stottlemeyer, her lead psychiatrist, said.

“And that means what, exactly?” I asked.

“We try one more time, and if that fails we have two options. Warehouse her on anti-psychotics and sedatives, or hospice care.”

“I thought we’d resolved that earlier,” I said.

“People change their minds,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Ah. The hall of mirrors,” I added.

“Precisely,” she said, satisfied that I remembered our discussion from the day before. “People change their mind all the time.”

“I’m listening.”

“We think it’s too soon to throw in the towel, so we’d like to try some orthomolecular treatments.”

“Linus Pauling, right?”

She nodded. “Right. So you know about his work with Hawkins out at Stanford?”

“The basics, yes. I also found that the NIH and others in mainstream psychiatry consider this regimen to be little more than snake oil.”

“We don’t have a whole lot left to try.”

“Well, I guess as long as you don’t blow out her liver there’s not a lot to lose.”

“So, you agree?”

I shook my head. “I’m not qualified to make this decision, or am I missing something?”

“Well, the option is palliative care.”

“Warehousing her, you mean. Until her liver fails.”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Or we can try the orthomolecular regimen for a while, perhaps try another round of ECT. If we still find she’s made no progress…well…at least we’ll know we tried everything.”

“And you need my permission? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you have more papers for me to sign?”

Stottlemeyer grinned as she nodded my way. “Always.”

+++++

I met my grandfather at his favorite place, the S&D Oyster Company down on McKinney, after I left Timberlawn, and I filled him in on the results.

“So, you signed their papers?”

“I did.”

“I don’t trust them, Pat. All they’re after is money, more and more money.”

“Welcome to modern medicine,” I sighed.

“Bullshit! Psychiatry isn’t medicine, it’s voodoo with a few crystal balls thrown in for good measure.”

“Don’t leave out the smoke and mirrors.”

“And don’t make fun of me!” he snarled.

“I wasn’t.”

He settled down before his half dozen arrived, then he made his cocktail sauce in the little silver bowl, adding what I considered way too much Tabasco sauce, then he speared an oyster and dipped it in his sauce before he slammed it down, chasing the slimy thing down with a long pull from a Lone Star longneck.

“So, how’d the car do? Still running okay?”

“Not bad – for a Jaguar, anyway.”

“And you’re such an expert, right? The boy who still doesn’t own an automobile!”

“I’ll get one when I need one.”

“And what about Genie?”

“I’ll get one when I need one.”

“You’ll never get another chance for happiness like this one. You know that, right?”

“That was a broken dream, Paw-paw. It was never going to work out, and we always knew it.”

“Nothing works unless you try to make it work.”

“That doesn’t sound like love to me. That sounds like a job.”

He sighed. “That boy needs you.”

“He needs his father, not another disposable marriage.”

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

“I think I found my answers to this place twenty years ago. That’s why I don’t live here.”

“I wanted it all, you know? Again. I wanted to watch you start a family, know that somehow you’d be carrying on the name, but I guess Joan killed all that, too.”

“I like to think Dad didn’t really know her, but…”

“But some mistakes we never get over. They chase us to our grave.”

I nodded. I understood what he was grieving for, because I had been too, and perhaps I had been all my life.

“So,” he continued, “I take it you’ll sell the house? And I can take your name off the list at the country club?”

“And Koon Kreek.”

“It’s to be a clean break, then,” he sighed, and while he indeed understood, he was now broken hearted.

“I think it has to be. There aren’t many good memories here, and the good ones mostly came from you.”

“I tried, Pat. I saw what was happening, so I tried. I know it wasn’t enough…”

“You made all the difference in the world.”

“Thanks.” He was still too tough to shed a tear, but I could tell he was upset. “So, you’ll stay in Boston?”

“I may be moving to Frankfurt later this year, but that will be a short term assignment. I’ll probably go back to Boston after that.”

“Frankfurt, as in Germany? What the hell…?”

“We’re expanding our route network in Europe. I’ll be making evaluation flights for a few months, but there’s a possibility I could end up based over there.”

“Dear God.”

“And just think…I’ll be flying in and out of Tempelhof, too.”

“Oh, you’re full of all kinds of good news, aren’t you?”

“I think I’m going to get my promotion to captain, but with this European thing that’d mean I’d be flying 727s.”

“That’s the little three engined one, right?”

“Yup. Great airplane, though.”

“I thought you liked the TriStar.”

“I do, but it’s not a short haul airliner.”

He nodded. “I guess you’re right, of course. Moving around like that…a family would never work out.”

“I’m not ruling it out. I am not, however, going to rush into a marriage with Genie – or anyone else, for that matter.”

“You may be right about that, but don’t underestimate that girl, or her love for you. She’s not the type to give up so easily.”

I shook my head. “As soon as she understands I’ll never move back to Highland Park she’ll lose all interest in me. Again.”

“You’re too cynical.”

“You might be right, but actually I kind of doubt it.”

“What’s going to happen to Carol?”

“If this latest effort fails, then palliative care.”

“Dear God. What did she do to deserve a life like this?”

“Good question. Why don’t you ask him when you see him.”

“God damn atheist…” he muttered.

I laughed just a little at the unintended ironies within that statement. “Have you ever considered hooking up with Deborah?”

“What? Are you serious?”

“She’s still cute, and I bet she could clean your clock.”

“And you need to get your mind out of the gutter, young man.”

I held up my hands in defeat. “Okay…if you say so.”

“Do I look like a cradle-snatcher to you?”

“No. You look lonely. And I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

“Balls!”

“Use ‘em or lose ‘em, Old Man.”

“Yup. It’s high time I kicked your ass. You ready?”

“No. But I bet you can’t eat another oyster…”

+++++

I flew back to Kansas City to finish up transition school, but I stayed with the L-1011 in order to remain flying our trans-Atlantic routes out of Boston, and after I made captain I bought a place on Louisburg Square in the heart of Beacon Hill. Four bedrooms, too. Just in case. Grandfather flew up for a visit and he liked the place. I heard Genie and her husband had reconciled after I left, and I smiled at the convenience of her ability to accommodate the bastard after he’d cheated on her, but mainly because I hoped things would work out for Tom.

I made one more trip to Dallas to visit with Carol’s treatment team at Timberlawn, and they advised she had reached the limits of what they considered possible, and while they recommended hospice as a near term option I wasn’t yet ready to go there. Just the idea that a physically healthy thirty-something year old could go into hospice to die by starvation was just too much for me. Still, when I considered Carol’s description of life in her hallucinatory world was simply overwhelming, about all I could do was ask myself what I’d want her to do if I was in her place. It was impossible, at least emotionally impossible for me to process, and I drove back to the house in a funk.

Later that afternoon I met grandfather and Deborah at the country club, and after my morning at Timberlawn I enjoyed their apparent happiness. I told him I planned to put the house on the market while still here in town, and he wasn’t surprised – again, he was just a little sad. I wasn’t surprised when the house sold just days after the listing posted, but it was a bittersweet parting of the ways, a final goodbye to the life I had once known – and turned away from.

I resumed flying the TriStar out of Logan on the Paris–De Gaulle run once again, only now from the left seat. I figured that when I got too lonely I could always count on Ellen to cheer me up, and somewhere along the way I started studying medieval art and architecture. I was soon carrying a camera everywhere I went, shooting roll after roll of Kodachrome as I walked around Paris, and I suppose life might have gone on like that indefinitely…

…until one night, when I’d just returned from Paris I listened to a voicemail on my answering machine. The call was from a Detective Ben Barnes, with the HomicideDivision of the Dallas Police Department; his voice was hard as steel, and asked that I please give him a call. 

“As soon as possible,” he added – as an after thought…

+++++

Barnes painted a pretty graphic picture over the phone: Carol’s bed at Timberlawn a ragged, blood-soaked mess, the mattress and pillow shredded by a long blade kitchen knife. But it turned out that there was one problem, and it was a biggie: there was no body. Anywhere. And now they had lab results on the blood, and it wasn’t human. In short, Barnes told me that it appeared to have been a ‘staged’ murder, and the old cop wondered why.

“Tell me about your sister,” Barnes asked.

And I told him quite literally everything I knew about her condition, up to an including the recent discussions to place Carol in hospice.

“And you say you didn’t approve that move?”

“No sir, I just couldn’t…I’m not prepared to give up hope.”

“Does she have any money?”

I felt a cold chill. “Yessir, actually quite a lot, but it’s held at Northern Trust and isn’t easy to access. In her case she would need my written permission to even get a dollar from the account.”

“And no one has been in contact with you about her holdings?”

“No sir, no one.”

“This is weird,” Barnes sighed, lost in thought. “Well, let me know if anyone tries to get in touch with you…”

I told him I would, then I called Northern Trust to check on any suspicious activity and there had been none. Next I called my grandfather. He’d been distraught for several days about all this, but he didn’t know what to do. 

“There’s no way anyone could get at her money, is there?” he asked.

“Not without my consent.”

“Could anyone fake that?”

“Doubtful. And I just talked to Cheryl at Northern Trust; they’ll be extra vigilant now, more so than usual, and she won’t authorize a thing without first talking to me in person.”

“Pat? What if she was kidnapped? What if they try to hold her for ransom?”

“Well, unless they have a shitload of Thorazine on hand they’ll have their hands full. Not sure they’d be able to manage her for more than a few days…”

“But, what are you saying – that they’d kill her?”

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions, Paw-paw. No one’s tried to contact me yet, and I assume no one has tried to touch bases with you…”

“No…no…not yet…”

“Well then, it’s a mystery, that’s for sure…”

And that word, mystery, suddenly popped to mind, flashing in bold red lights. Mystery? What about that word was suddenly so important?

Mystery?

Agatha Christie? Agatha Christie – mysteries?

Carol had been addicted to Christie’s novels in high school and had studied her life and works in college, at SMU, and I remembered her talking about the author faking her death and disappearing for a few weeks, and there’d been a later novel where the protagonist faked her own death…and as it had been set in ancient Egypt it had been Carol’s favorite.

Oh holy shit.

Could she have been faking schizophrenia? For almost ten years?

No way. No fucking way. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around that one, but…yet…something was most definitely up, only now, and quite suddenly, I thought that Carol was probably behind it all.

“Paw-paw?” I said. “Do you remember Carol’s infatuation with Agatha Christie?”

“The writer? Now that you mention it, yes, I do.”

“I can think of two incidents Carol mentioned where the writer faked a death…”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“So wait a minute…are you saying you think Carol might be behind this?”

“It’s a theory.”

“Pardon my French, but – shit!”

“Yup, that’s the first word that sprang to mind. She told me once that Christie disappeared for a couple of weeks when she found out her husband had been cheating on her…drove her car out to a quarry and parked it next to a deep water pit. Just enough hints to implicate her husband, too. I remember that much about it.”

“You gonna call that detective?”

“I think I’d better.”

“Well, I’ll be a suck-egg-mule,” the old man said, and I had to laugh at that one.

“One of these days you’re going to have to tell me what that means.”

“Hell if I know. Your great-grandfather used it when he saw someone he hadn’t seen in a while.”

“Your father?”

“No, your grandmother’s. He worked on the Texas and Pacific Railway, he was a civil engineer. Laid out tracks, designed bridges, that kind of thing.”

“He’s the one who lost an arm, right?”

“Yup. Settled on a farm outside of Sherman, found oil in one of the pastures. He taught you how to draw when you were about four…”

“I almost remember that…drawing bridges…he helped me draw a bridge.”

I could hear the old man smile, even over the phone. “That’s right. Your dad always said that was a big deal, why you went into engineering. You never can tell, I guess.”

“Geesh, I haven’t thought about that in years…”

We shot the breeze a little after that then he rang off, and I called Barnes at the police department and told him of my latest suspicions, and a while later the idea of building bridges popped to mind. Agatha Christie and building bridges.

What the hell? What could that mean?

+++++

My routine on flight days was simple. Sleep-in late and have a small breakfast, dress and head to the airport – Logan – and check-in at the dispatch office in Terminal E then head out to the gate. Assuming the equipment was there, I’d drop off my flight bag in the cockpit then check in with the ramp agent on the ground, go over fuel load-outs and check tire pressures with him before I made my first walk around the aircraft. The flight attendants would usually be working in the galleys by the time I made it back into the aircraft, and I’d start programming the necessary waypoints into the INS, or inertial navigation system, a tedious routine that demanded absolute concentration. After all three INS systems had been programmed and cross-checked, the Flight Engineer and I would go down and do a more in-depth walk around, and after we returned to the cockpit the First Officer would go down and make sure the fueling was complete and then bring a copy of the load-out back up the cockpit. When the passengers were called, one of us, usually the FO, would step into the forward entry and do the obligatory ‘Meet & Greet’ – saying hello to passengers as they stepped aboard, before they made their way aft to their assigned seats.

A few weeks after my Agatha Christie revelation I found myself posted at the entry doing the Meet & Greet, and first to board were two elderly women, both dressed in black, and both rather frail looking – and one had an old book in hand. Ellen, working as the senior flight attendant that evening, helped me get the two old women to their seats, which happened to be Row 1 on the starboard or right side of the First Class cabin, and when I helped the frailest looking woman into her window seat I just managed to look at the woman’s face.

And I saw Carol’s face. Heavily made up and wearing a wig, but it was Carol lurking behind a Cheshire Cat’s grin.

And her seat mate, and I assumed her partner in crime, was none other than her psychiatrist, Dr. Amy Stottlemeyer, also equally well disguised.

Carol then handed me a book, Agatha Christie’s ‘Death Comes As The End’, and as I looked at her she pointed to a small envelope in the book she’d used as a place marker and she smiled, said “Thank you so much,” in a stilted patrician British accent before she turned dismissively and looked out the window.

“My pleasure,” I said to a grinning Amy Stottlemeyer. I noticed then that the two were holding hands, and that they were looking most pleased with themselves.

Now at a complete loss, I walked back to the cockpit and opened the book to get the envelope, and breathlessly read Carol’s message before I put her ‘gift’ in my flight bag. I then contorted my way into the captain’s seat while doing my level best not to laugh out loud, but I think only the years of discipline I had by then accumulated allowed me to focus on my duties during that flight. I do recall the usual seven hours seemed to last about a week.

I met them at the baggage carousel, but Ellen ambled up and asked if I was going into the city. I told her I would meet her in the lobby of the Crillon at six and she sighed then walked off in a huff. The two old ladies looked like expectant owls just then, their eyes fixed on mine, waiting for the obvious next question.

“So, ladies,” I said as I turned to address my fugitives, “what can I do for you this fine morning?”

“Help us find a place to live,” Carol said.

“Someplace with a nice view,” Amy said. “And a big bathtub,” she added.

And yes, I knew just the place.

+++++

A few months passed, autumn fell and winter assumed her rightful place in the sky, and a light snow was falling on the ramp outside Logan’s International Terminal as I finished my walk-around the TriStar. This was to be another momentous flight, my first time flying Grandfather – ever. He’d always hated flying and did so only when absolutely necessary, and as this vacation was absolutely necessary he was up in the Ambassador’s Club lounge nervously waiting for his flight to be called.

I of course stood in the entry to perform the evening’s Meet & Greet, and there they were, Mr. and Mrs. Denton Healey, walking down the Jetway together. I shook his hand then leaned in to give Deborah a peck on the cheek, then I turned my attention back to my grandfather and his nervous gaze.

“There’s no way something this big can fly,” he growled as he took in the hundreds of seats. “Pat! This thing is positively huge!”

“It is, a little.”

“This is a long way from Addison Airport, you know?”

I looked at him with all the love I had in my heart. “I’d have never made it here without you.”

He looked at me and nodded, then he stood aside and made way for Genie and Tom – and now I was indeed shocked and speechless.

“We’re on our way to our wedding reception, Patrick,” my grandfather said. “Surely you’d expect my daughter-in-law to be in attendance?”

“Oh yes, I see your point,” I said, as Tom walked up to shake my hand.

“Think you could show me around the cockpit?” the boy with the glowing eyes asked.

And I nodded. With a surprised smile, I think. “Yes, I think we can manage that.”

Genie of course looked radiant and I knew when I looked into her eyes that it was pointless to resist this life any longer. My destiny – and her’s too, I assume – had been written in the stars so long ago that not one among us would dare question such a thing.

Coda

Poor Grandfather was beside himself when he saw Carol waiting for us in the lobby of the Crillon, and I feared this might be the shortest reunion possible – but no, he was made of stronger stuff. He always had been, in case you didn’t know that by now.

We sat together that evening, all of us, getting caught up over dinner. Carol was writing and Amy was painting and both had resumed their affair with the piano, and Grandfather couldn’t wait to hear them play Debussy.

He had come a long way, I guess you could say. From growing up on a farm outside of Sherman Texas to eating caviar in the Palais Royale on Christmas Eve, from driving the first automobiles to watching men walk on the Moon. He watched Carol and Amy and felt their love, all our love, really, and I doubt any grandfather had ever been happier. Carol took the newlyweds back to the Crillon, leaving me to walk with Genie and Tom through the palace gardens. I stood between them and held their hands and we talked about simple things like love and family as a gentle snow started to fall, and once I thought I heard my father calling my name; I looked up and for the life of me the snow looked just like stars falling down to hold us in his embrace.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple, every word of it…

[Close to You \\ The Carpenters]

So, adios for now…

Shadows of shadows passing. Shadows on the flickering white limestone of a cave’s wall.

You were there, weren’t you? Can’t you remember?

[Ray La Montagne \\ I Still Care For You]

C1.8

Two of the police department’s rescue divers stood in knee deep water just a few meters from the steep stone steps closest to the St Francis Yacht Club’s main parking lot, waiting for Callahan and Bullitt – and their instructor – to suit up. They looked tired, almost bored, and probably because they knew the afternoon was going to turn into yet another one of Homicide’s wild goose chases.

And by now there had been hundreds of sightings of the glistening black ‘sea monster’ – ever since word of the two gruesome homicides had hit the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, with dozens more fresh sightings coming in almost every day since publication. There were now overloaded excursion boats taking madras-clad tourists on Monster Hunts around Fisherman’s Wharf, and The National Enquirer had posted ‘rewards’ for anyone getting a clear photograph of the beast. After almost two weeks not a single verified sighting had been officially recorded, and the two police divers were looking forward to another unpleasant afternoon in the chilly water.

Bullitt was still fiddling with his regulator, fixing it to his 80 pound tank incorrectly before he remembered the correct way. Callahan looked on and shook his head, then lugged his gear down to the water’s edge. Harry thought the five-eighths neoprene wetsuit felt stiff as a board as he waded into waist deep water, and once his tank and vest were secured he knelt a little and pulled his fins on, only then walking into deeper water. Once Bullitt waded out to join Callahan, they walked over to their instructor and talked over the dive plan one more time.

“Okay,” Dave Mackay said, “we’re going to surface swim on snorkels out to the end of the breakwater. That’s about 700 yards but we’re at slack tide so it shouldn’t be too hard…”

“What exactly are we looking for,” Dan O’Malley, the lead police diver asked.

“You read the reports,” Callahan grumbled. “A glowing green ball – or a fucking sea monster,” he added, after spitting out some raw sea water.

The group slipped their masks over their faces and cleared their snorkels then turned and, side by side, swam out into the marina’s lone fairway and on towards the tip of the long stone breakwater. 

And no one saw a thing.

The group stopped and gathered around Mackay once they arrived at the point. “Okay, the bottom drops off rapidly from here, so let’s head down to the bottom and we’ll use 80 degrees as our primary compass heading.”

“How far we going?” O’Malley asked.

“It’s about 700 yards to the East Marina. We’ll surface there and compare tank pressures; hopefully we’ll have enough to check out the warehouse pilings.”

“Oh, crap,” Bullitt’s eyes rolled as he mumbled, “that sounds just fuckin’ great.”

“Are there sharks out here?” Callahan asked.

O’Malley just shook his head at that one, and he had to look away.

“Oh, not too many,” Mackay said, but every now and then Great Whites and Blues come in on the tide.”

Bullitt looked down and growled “What the fuckin’ hell am I doing out here,” before he put his regulator in his mouth and followed Callahan and Mackay down into the gloomy gray-black water. At eight feet they passed through the first gentle thermocline and the water temperature dropped suddenly from 62 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit; and twenty feet the temp dropped another four degrees and Frank remembered to piss in his wetsuit. The warmth from his urine passed along to the torso, warming him for a few minutes, but after a minute passed his pee had been pushed completely out of his wetsuit as he swam along, and the chilly water surrounded him again. At thirty feet it was so dark they needed flashlights, and visibility couldn’t have been more than twenty feet in any direction, but the water was colder still.

A motorboat buzzed by overhead, and Bullitt was sure he could make out the deep thrumming sound of a large diesel motor, the type that powered huge, ocean going freighters. 

At 52 feet they came to the mud and sand bottom and, after double checking compass headings the group swam off to the east – side-by-side again but now about ten feet apart.

Bullitt saw something metallic ahead and aimed his flashlight at a discarded can of Pennzoil motor oil and he almost laughed out loud…because why wouldn’t a Pennzoil Monster need quart every now and then…

…but then that feeling returned…

‘This is wrong. You shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Turn back.’

The words kept repeating and repeating. Then the words changed, became more emphatic.

“You should turn back – now. You don’t belong here.”

But these words didn’t form and come from inside his mind. He heard them.

Bullitt stopped and looked off to his left – into deeper water, and then he realized that Harry and the others were gathered next to him.

Mackay picked up his dive slate and scribbled out a note: “Did you hear that?”

Bullitt nodded and fingered the ‘Okay’ sign by bringing his thumb and index finger together; Callahan and the police divers did too. Bullitt pointed at his ears, then off into the darkness to their north. His meaning was clear: ‘The voice is over there.’

Mackay reluctantly nodded agreement; the two police divers looked unsure of themselves but nodded. Mackay picked up his pressure gauge and then had everyone hold up their gauge so he could verify readings, then the group took off, swimming along the bottom into deeper, darker, and much colder water to their north.

The same thrumming sound grew deeper and Bullitt sensed it was coming nearer, and when he looked up he saw the huge silhouette of an outbound freighter heading for the Golden Gate, its single cavitating screw leaving a raucous swishing sound as it passed – and he also noted the arcing silhouette of a large shark following along behind the freighter, perhaps hoping for some scraps of food from the ship’s galley.

He checked his depth gauge again and found they were approaching 70 feet, and his tank pressure was down to fifteen hundred pounds – and he knew at this depth the pressure would start to fall rapidly. He wished he could pee again because the layer of water in his wetsuit was getting cooler the deeper they went, but he shook it off and kicked onward…

…until just ahead Frank saw a faint cobalt blue glow…

Mackay and O’Malley stopped, then Callahan and the other diver did as well.

But Bullitt did not.

He kept swimming towards the glow so Callahan followed, then the other three fell in behind Callahan.

The source of the glow wasn’t far away now, though Bullitt was the first to see what made the water glow.

From about fifty feet away he could just make out the top half of a large blue sphere, and as he swam closer he saw that the structure was half buried in the muddy bottom.

From thirty feet away he could tell that the sphere was completely translucent.

When he swam closer he saw movement inside the sphere. Closer still and he could make out individual figures moving about, almost as if they too were floating in a liquid medium.

He felt someone by his side and turned to see Harry’s wide-eyed astonishment – then he felt Mackay’s growing trepidation…

…and then one of the creatures inside the sphere noticed the divers…

…it swam – or flew – or glided – across to the curved wall of the sphere…

…and Callahan could see it’s pale blue body was birdlike, almost completely covered in feathers, and it’s face was owl-like, with massive amber eyes staring into his own…

…then several more of the creatures came to the edge of the orb; some were blue-feathered, others green, but only one was pinkish-feathered – and this pink one, androgynously female, pushed aside the others as ‘she’ came to the wall of the sphere and looked at Bullitt for a moment – before her eyes shifted and settled on Callahan’s…

…then she turned and motioned at one of the others…

…and in the next instant the group was standing in the knee deep waters adjacent to the yacht club…

…and Callahan could see Devlin and Jimmy, the boy who had responded to Devlin’s screams, and the first to be murdered by the creature; then Callahan realized that Devlin was screaming at him as he walked out of the water with Frank and the other divers…

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he thought. ‘What is she screaming at?’

And when she realized her mistake she stood watching the divers walk out of the black water, and Jimmy walked back to the parking lot to wait for his ride home and instinctively Callahan and Bullitt knew the impossible had happened. This was the scene as it had been almost a month before, only now there had been a different outcome.

“It was wrong,” Bullitt whispered, suddenly remembering what the pink creature had said to him. “It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”

“What are you talking about?” Callahan said, now staring at the girl up on the sidewalk.

“Harry? What are we doing out here?”

“I have no idea,” Callahan sighed. He took off his gear and stopped once when he tried to remember what day it was, then he walked up to the girl under the street light because he couldn’t stop staring at her.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word

[Neil Young \\ Old Man]

Oh, so many shadows. Shadows within shadows dancing. Was Plato’s cave ever really real?

[Hypnogaja \\ Looking Glass]

C4

In a strange twist of fate, Denton Ripley read Nostromo’s orders before the message ever reached the Nostromo, and Ellen – and he’d never felt more helpless in his life.

The order, decoded as Special Order 937, had been intercepted by his COMMs team, and the message had been directed to the ore processing tug Nostromo that was currently en route from Thedus to Sparta. The Company had just activated a distress beacon on LV-426, a planet near the tugs current projected course, but after reading through the dispatch Ripley now knew that the tug’s crew – explicitly deemed expendable in the instructions sent to the tug’s Science Officer – was being sent to collect specimens of the organism. 

And with that knowledge now in hand, Denton Ripley was confronting the single most devastating decision he’d ever faced.

He knew how the organism gestated, and how it would spread inside the confines of a ship, so if the Nostromo’s crew was considered expendable the immediate reason was that the crew would used as incubators. His daughter Ellen’s fate, in other words, had been dictated in that message. She had been deemed expendable when he had refused to submit to the Co-Dominium, so he too had, in effect, sealed her fate.

But after reading the orders he knew the tug had also being redirected to take an Earth return trajectory, so the tug would not carry the organism to Sparta. That meant the Company planned on releasing the organism in the caverns currently housing Earth’s surviving population – and he was duty-bound to protect those lives, to prevent the deaths of the remaining population within the United States.

But even so the final, and the most devastating blow of all – was the psychic scar that would result from abandoning his daughter to the fates. For though he now possessed the means to use the Tall White’s FTL drive to jump directly to this planet, this LV-426, he could not alter the effects of relativistic time travel. He could jump to the planet in minutes, yet years would transpire before his arrival in real time. Whatever rescue mission he could mount would arrive years too late to prevent transmission of the organism, while at the same time his sworn duty was to protect the remaining citizens of the United States, and on the Earth. So, simply put, he knew the outcome of any utilitarian calculus meant he would have to remain in Earth orbit, but deep in his gut he wanted to ignore that most obvious conclusion and try to save his daughter.

Yet he knew he couldn’t. The physics of relativity prevented any other outcome.

And if the laws of physics prevented action, the implicit laws behind the oath he had sworn also prevented any other course of action.

So he had been fighting with himself for hours, trying to see a way clear of his dilemma, but he always arrived at the same conclusion. The “right” decision. Even if it was the wrong decision, personally.

But once the decision had been made he also had to decide whether to tell Judy, his wife, about the Special Order – and the most likely outcomes of its implementation. If he told her the whole truth then she too would be haunted by his choice for the rest of her life; as it was now, only he had to shoulder this particular burden on his own. Was such deception the humane choice, or was deception ever truly allowed in marriage…?

And in his gut he knew the answer to that question, too.

He’d have to tell her.

The blue light on his COMMs panel started blinking, and the blue light meant that the Lars Jansen avatar had something important to tell him. Ripley leaned forward and swiped the reply button on his screen and the usual ghostly swirl began to take shape onscreen – as Jansen’s form slowly consolidated and took shape in there – and Denton drummed his fingers on the duraplast desktop while he waited for this extra little bit of melodrama to play out.

“Admiral? I’m sorry, but you look distraught. Are you concerned about your daughter?”

“I am, yes.”

“I understand. This is called a Double Bind, is it not?”

“Yes. But I was thinking Catch-22 might be more appropriate.”

The avatar paused while it retrieved the necessary information, then ‘Lars’ spoke again. “The reference directs to a novel by Joseph Heller, an anti-war novel from the 1960s?”

“That’s the one. What’s on your mind, Lars?”

“Two items, Admiral. The most pressing is an indication that the Spartan fleet is mobilizing. As they are utilizing sub-light travel between multiple Jump Points we should expect their arrival within six weeks.”

“Noted.”

“Shall I pass this information on to Admiral Davis?”

“No. We’ll have all the captains over to discuss the implications and work up a plan of action. What’s the other item?”

“Do you recall the directed energy weapon deployed inside the Sun during our initial departure from Earth?”

“Yes, of course,” Ripley sighed, remembering that it was on that day that the real Lars Jansen had passed away, drowning in his own vomit.

“I have found strong indications that this weapon has been deployed on at least two other occasions in this system, and both times involving the Earth.”

“What?” Ripley snarled, sitting up abruptly in his chair. “What were the impacts?”

“The first use I have detected was in 2030, and the impact was quite simple. The weapon was deployed directly under the Cascadia subduction zone, triggering the eruptions of Mounts Baker, Rainier, St Helens, Hood, and Shasta. These eruptions…”

“…triggered the first impacts of the current Ice Age,” Ripley sighed.

“Exactly so, yes. The weapon was deployed again, and from the evidence I have uncovered it would appear to have happened almost immediately after our combined fleets left the solar system…”

“And that triggered additional eruptions, I take it?”

“Yes, Admiral, along the ring of fire in both the Southwest and Northwest Pacific.”

Ripley shook his head. “So, as soon as the Hyperion Battle Group departed for the Mintaka system, and our battle group was out of the way, too.”

“Yes, Admiral. When the Earth would be defenseless.”

“So,” Ripley said, thinking out loud, “there were three events in total. One at Earth almost a hundred years ago, then the hit on our Sun, then again on Earth, and this one right after our departure. Lars, did anyone on Earth have the capability to do this a hundred years ago?”

“Without a deeper understanding of the weapon, Admiral, such conjecture is meaningless.”

Ripley nodded. “Okay. First things first. Who benefitted most as a result of the first deployment?”

“Private space launching entities, primarily the Weyland Group, as it was then known, as well as SpaceX and Blue Origin.”

“Anyone else?”

“The BAPists cult would have to be seen as the prime beneficiaries over the long term.”

“Lars, can you find any evidence that there were BAPists within the Weyland interests a hundred years ago?”

“There is both direct and indirect evidence to support that conclusion.”

“Does it appear that interests within the original Weyland Group made efforts to conceal such associations?”

“Yes, Admiral. That is what I meant by indirect evidence.”

“So. Indirect evidence versus guilt by association. That’s not firm enough, Lars. I need something that ties the BAPists to the use of this weapon…”

“Records from the period in question, from the era before the first eruptions, is limited by accessibility issues, Admiral. It is possible that more records could be within the caverns below, but that is unknown.”

“So, it’s time to go down and initiate contact. God…I hate to imagine what those poor souls have been through.”

“Yessir. I have been able to locate multiple possible access points, Admiral. Survivors in North America have deployed ingenious elevator-like air processing ducts, so as the depth of the ice increases the air ducts increase in height.” Lars put several images on screen. “There also appear to be structures near these ducts used by, I assume, maintenance teams. It would seem logical that our ground teams approach the survivors through these access portals.” More images appeared, and Ripley studied them one by one, then he scrolled through them a few times before speaking.

“When these survivors went underground…is there…damn, how do we approach them, Lars? If they were forced underground by the BAPists, wouldn’t they consider anyone trying to contact them to be hostile, too?”

“I can only speculate, Admiral.”

Ripley steepled his fingers on his chest as he leaned back in his chair. “Any evidence these different cavern groups are communicating with one another?”

“Of course!” Lars shouted. “How did I miss that. Look at this image, Admiral…”

“That’s a radio antenna, Lars,” Ripley said as new images flooded his screen. “Actually, no, this image here shows a rather complex antenna farm. Short-wave and long-wave antennas here, and I see both UHF and ULF antennas here, early twentieth-century stuff, but…”

“Admiral, I have no information on ULF…”

“Look under submarine communication protocols…”

“The only files I can access are incomplete, Admiral, and in any event, our fleet no longer monitors these frequencies as there are no longer any working submarines.”

Ripley leaned forward and flipped a switch on his desktop panel. “COMMs? Ripley here.”

“Aye, sir?”

“Pull up what you can on early 21^st century radio protocols, including UHF and ULF frequencies, and start scanning for signals on those bands. Record whatever you pick up. Center your efforts around Kentucky, New Mexico, and South Dakota.”

“Aye, sir. Uh, Admiral, we could deploy a geo-synchronous buoy to monitor these regions while we’re over other parts of the planet.”

“Okay, COMMs, but let’s not advertise what we’re up to. Launch stealth satellites when you can.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Why stealth satellites, Admiral?” Lars asked.

“No reason to let Antarctic Traffic Control know what we’re up to.”

“Wouldn’t they be scanning for such traffic too, Admiral?”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure why they would be now, but see if you can identify any likely satellites, Lars. It’ll look like an orbiting antenna farm.”

“Admiral, there are currently more than nineteen thousand objects remaining in orbit.”

“Good. That ought to keep you busy for a few minutes.”

“I have identified two possible satellites so far, sir.”

“Lars, you are an incorrigible showoff; you know that, right?”

+++++

Neal Davis from Enterprise and Dean Farrell from Stavridis studied the images on the wall mounted monitor for several minutes, then they turned to Ripley.

“You’re sure ATC is monitoring them?” Davis said.

And Ripley nodded. “Continuously. We identified two originally, but then we backtracked, looking for similar satellites over other known cave systems on the Eurasian landmass. Once we located the satellites we were able to locate isolated pockets of survivors in France, Germany, Russia, and China. As more data came in we pinpointed more facilities in Israel and South Africa, then several in the Himalayas. In all we now have identified fourteen large cavern systems that are currently exhibiting extensive signs of life.”

Farrell shook his head and looked away. “Dear God,” he mumbled as he walked to the viewport. “I wonder how many people made it inside?”

Admiral Davis looked at Ripley, trying to gauge his mood. “How do you want to handle this, Denton?” Though technically both one star flag officers, Denton was the senior officer and therefore ranked Davis, but they’d been friends for yours.

“Technically, our primary obligation is to the survivors in caves located in US territory, but that won’t suffice in the current situation. Cast aside our moral duties for a moment and consider that the next Einstein might be residing in Chinese cave, or a German…hell, it doesn’t matter where…”

“What matters is who we choose to take with us,” Farrell sighed.

“Exactly,” Ripley added.

“But we can’t just swoop down and take all the smart people,” Davis said. “Believe it or not, if this planet ur-Pak has identified is indeed viable, we’ll need armies of builders, not…”

“Point taken,” Farrell nodded, “but how are these groups of survivors going to take it when we come in and decide to take their most able people?”

“We’ve also got to keep in mind that we have about five weeks to pull this off,” Ripley added. “We have no real intel on the Co-Dominium’s ships or the state of their weaponry, and I’d hate to get sucker-punched by them…”

“That’s simple enough,” Davis sighed. “Agamemnon and Stavridis are the smallest ships we have, but that also have the Maser. We’ve completed two on Enterprise and the Connie is about a week away from completing their first…”

“Enterprise can’t stay behind, Neal,” Ripley stated matter of factly. “She can carry more survivors than any other ship in the fleet, and if the survivors run into a hostile environment on this new world…”

“Constellation can handle anything that comes up,” Davis countered.

“You have an air wing. You have troop transports to carry colonists down to the surface. Connie has two little shuttles, so…you were saying?”

Davis looked away, nodding. “Two ships against an armada? Denton, there’s no way you’ll make it out of earth orbit…”

Farrell looked at Ripley, his shoulders sagging: “That weapon? The particle beam they fired into Earth and the Sun? Could that be used against us?”

Denton nodded. “Dean, until we know who has that weapon, or even where it’s located, none of us is safe. My guess is they’ll try to deploy it against us, because in theory it will blow right through our Langston Fields. If they take us out and we fail to destroy the weapon, I’m not sure moving any colonies not sanctioned by this Co-Dominium will ever be safe.”

“Has ur-Pak communicated this information to his people?”

Ripley nodded. “Yeah, but once again relativity will be working against us. By the time his message reaches their home worlds this will ancient history to you and me.” Ripley looked at his two best friends and shrugged. “This is going to be our fight, and ours alone. Neal? I want you to get together with your sociologists and physicists and work out a good means of contacting the survivors down there, then work out how to distribute those people amongst the fleet.”

“Right,” Davis nodded.

“Dean? I want you to fly a CAP,” referring to the concept of a Combat Air Patrol as first deployed over US Navy carriers, “ and probably out around Venus. You’ll be in a good position to see their fleet as individual ships Jump into the system.”

“What about you, Denton?” Davis asked. “You have a plan?”

“Oh hell, Neal, you know me. I always have a plan, but first things first. I want to go down and see these caves, maybe talk to their leaders…”

The rest of the fleet’s captains arrived and there were more discussions about the logistics of moving survivors up to the waiting ships, but Dean Farrell excused himself and returned to Stavridis, and a few minutes later the OOD informed Ripley that Stavridis had departed for Venus and he grinned knowingly. It was just like Farrell to think the problem through and arrive at the most sound conclusion. The fleet was vulnerable now, so he would move to protect it.

He watched the men and women of his fleet mingle and talk, and he noted the blue light on his desktop was still illuminated so at least he knew Lars was listening in, then he switched feeds and watched Stavridis powering away from the fleet before he turned to Judy. 

Now she too was worried to death about Ellen, but there was nothing he could do but be there for her. Still, her first reaction had been bitter: “We should have never left her with Stanton,” was her first reaction, but then again Judy was pregnant again and this wasn’t a mistake either would likely repeat.

“Are you going to go down to the surface?” she asked.

“I’m thinking about it.” Denton said, just as Admiral Davis walked over.

“It’s an unnecessary risk, Denton,” she said, looking from her husband to Davis. “In fact, no flag officer should go down there – because we have no idea what kind of diseases we might run into after those people have been in caves.”

“What do you recommend?” Davis asked.

“Send some medics with a company of Marines, and maybe one of the diplomats. Let them go make contact, but don’t allow any of them on our ships until we know we can handle the medical issues.”

Denton looked at Davis and nodded. “Makes sense. What do you think, Neal?”

“I concur.”

Judy nodded. “Each cave could present different pathogens, so just because one’s clear doesn’t mean they all will be.”

“What about genetic adaptation?” Davis asked. “Like…mutations?”

“They probably haven’t been down there long enough,” Judy said, looking away as she imagined the horrifying conditions the survivors were dealing with. “God, I can’t imagine what they’ve been through. The sanitation issues alone must be overwhelming.”

“Well,” Davis sighed, “we should know soon enough. Denton? You have diplomats onboard, right?”

“Singular. One gal from the State Department. Betsy Hollister. You want me to send for her?”

“Yup. She can go back to Enterprise with me. You want me to take a Middie?”

“Let me think about that for a minute.”

The lighting in the conference room went from white to red, and as alarms started going off all over the ship Ripley dove for his desk and hit the flashing red light.

“Ripley here. Sit-Rep?”

“Several objects just jumped in-system, Admiral. No IFF, and well, there’s no identification at all?”

“Did they come in through the Alderson Point?”

“No, sir. They appear to be FTL equipped ships, Admiral, and they appear to be – uh, wait one…”

And in the next instant his screen flickered and went dark, then all power throughout the ship went dark. Agamemnon’s 1G acceleration stopped and zero gravity conditions returned; Ripley felt himself floating free of the deck and not knowing what else else to do he pulled himself over to the viewport, instinctively wanting to see what was happening…

“What the hell is that?” Ripley heard someone say as he held out his hands to stop his flight across the conference room. 

“What do you see? Where?” Ripley asked.

“There, sir…”

Ripley looked down towards deep space and his eyes squinted. “What is that?” he whispered a moment later.

About all Ripley was sure of was that the blue sphere didn’t belong to the Tall Whites or the Co-Dominium. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but after fifteen years in space he’d never seen anything like it. Anywhere.

But a moment later he was pretty sure the sphere was coming closer. 

Then the red, battery powered lights flickered and came on; Ripley’s desktop rebooted and lights started flashing, demanding his immediate attention so he pushed off and floated back to his chair.

Then the usual computer generated warning came through the intercom: “Acceleration warning! All personnel prepare for 1G acceleration!”

“Everybody grab a seat,” Judy Ripley shouted, “now!”

Gravity returned as the engines flared and came online. Normal lighting returned. A million alarms were still sounding throughout the ship.

“Admiral, COMMs here. We have an incoming message. I’m not sure, but it seems to be coming from the first object.”

“Judy? Neal? Gather round, would you? Okay COMMs, put it through.”

His screen flickered and stabilized, and a moment later a middle aged man appeared. Dressed in a top coat as if he was cold, the man was wearing odd little eyeglasses and Ripley was certain he’d seen the man before.

“Hello there,” the man said genially. “What branch of the service are you in?”

“Excuse me?” Ripley said. The man grinned and once again Ripley knew he’d seen the man before returned.

“Are you Army, sir, or Navy?” the man said.

“Admiral Denton Ripley, sir. United States Naval Space Force.”

“Navy! Excellent! So, you’re an Annapolis man?”

“Yessir?”

“Excellent! Perhaps we can share a few wild tales while we’re here.”

“Excuse me, sir, but could I know your name?”

“Me?” the man said with a playful shrug. “Oh, why the hell not? My name is Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, what the devil are you doing here?”

(c)2023 adrian leverkuhn | abw | fiction, every word of it

[The Alan Parsons Project \\ To One in Paradise]

Questions upon questions. Layers of deception, time after time. What is real, and what is illusion – if not consciousness itself?

[King Crimson \\ Epitaph]

C 1.7

They were sitting in The Shadows, which turned out to be Frank’s favorite place to grab dinner, looking at the fog roll in; Callahan watched Alcatraz disappear inside the gray mist as the evening turned blue and lights sprinkled like fireflies danced along the hills above Berkeley. Frank had gone to make a call and suddenly alone, Callahan felt lost inside blue mists of his own.

Who were her parents? And who was Peter Weyland? Besides a psychiatrist who could, apparently, summon the nurses of a psychiatric ward almost at will and deploy them in the care of a woman half his age. And as far as Callahan could tell, at least so far, Weyland had no obvious romantic interest in Devlin at all. So, what was it? What compelled the man to look after the girl?

But…was he really looking after her?

Hadn’t Sanderson, the nurse, as much as implied that Haldol, a powerful anti-psychotic medication, was being used to control Devlin? That Devlin didn’t really suffer from hallucinations? That she wasn’t schizophrenic?

And then she’d said this black creature, whatever it was, was trying to protect Devlin?

Bullitt returned to their table and sat heavily, leaning back and rubbing the bridge of his nose just as their waitress arrived with two steins of Paulaner Weissbier, thin slices of orange floating above cold, thin heads. Bullitt nodded and then just looked at the various reflections cast within the amber liquid…

“Harry…it just doesn’t make sense. None of it. Sanderson implied she’d seen this thing. Two people from the yacht club saw the same damn animal, too. And all four from this morning’s incident described the same goddamn thing. An eight foot tall Creature from the Black Lagoon covered in Pennzoil, its eyes dripping with malice. And then this Sanderson says the fucker is protecting Miss Weyland, who really isn’t a Weyland at all.”

“When none of your assumptions make sense, it’s time to go back and question your assumptions.”

Bullitt shook his head. “In this business, Harry, assumptions are toxic. What we need is a cold, hard fact. Like who is this Weyland character…really? And who is Devlin Aubuchon? And we need a timeline, from the time she left the yacht club up to this morning. We need to know exactly where she was at all times. We need to know where this shrink was. We need to know who he gets from his ward to come and work at that house, and their schedules. I want to know who pays them; hell, I want to know how much they get paid, not just by who. I want to know which one of those nurses has been working the last week or so…” Bullitt sighed, his mind drifting again. “Ya know, at all three sightings of this Pennzoil monster…” Bullitt drifted off again, then he shook himself back to the moment: “…during each three, Weyland wasn’t around, was he?”

Callahan nodded. “Yeah?”

“So…maybe Weyland is ducking out of sight and putting on some kind of wetsuit…”

“Frank, are you saying you think Weyland has some kind of electric lance that can vaporize people?”

Bullitt picked up his stein and gulped down the beer – drinking the half liter in one long pull – before he looked over the rim of the stein at Callahan: “Until we can prove he doesn’t, we have to consider the possibility. But possibilities aren’t facts, either. Or are they, Harry?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Frank?”

Bullitt shrugged, looked at a gray ship heading towards the Golden Gate, a Navy hospital ship slipping noiselessly through the fog between Yerba Buena Island and the Embarcadero, probably on her way back to Vietnam to pick up more broken lives. “Did you know the piano player?” Bullitt asked, suddenly changing course.

“Furman? No, never heard him play.”

“You ever hear anything about him – at all?”

“No. But then again, I don’t spend a lot of time in those places.”

Bullitt nodded. “We have to dig around some, find out if there’s a link between Furman and Devlin.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Well, think about it, Harry. Sanderson said she thinks this thing, this Pennzoil Monster, is trying to protect Devlin. Okay, protect her…from what? And why is this thing involved – if the doc is supposed to be her guardian?”

“Well, what if he’s not…?”

“Not what? Protecting her?”

“Yeah. Then what do we do?”

“Not much we can do unless he’s holding her against her will, but we’d have a helluva time proving that if she’s even only slightly off her rocker…”

“There wasn’t anything wrong with her when we were out on his boat…”

“Which means what, Harry?”

“That the meds he uses to keep her knocked out had flushed out of her system. Which means he let them…”

Frank nodded. “Makes sense. So, let’s proceed on the assumption that Weyland is a bad actor. Where does that lead us?”

Harry shook his head. “I’m not sure that matters, Frank.”

“Okay – tell me…what does matter?”

“That thing. The thing you call the Pennzoil Monster. Which can’t be a monster. You know it and I know it, too. As silly as it sounded at first, Frank, I think you’re onto something. What if that creature is really just someone in a wetsuit wearing some kind of costume…”

“With a lance that vaporizes people? Harry…”

“Why not?”

“Okay, so we ask around, see if it’s even possible to build that kind of thing – but that leads to the next fork in the road.”

“Which is?” Callahan asked.

“What if it’s not possible, Harry? And what if we can’t find a wetsuit or costume?”

Callahan shrugged. “Then that means there’s an eight foot tall creature out there in the bay utilizing very advanced weaponry.”

Bullitt sighed as he shook off the possibility. “No…something doesn’t feel right, Harry. We’re missing something basic.”

“You ever done any Scuba diving?”

Bullitt Looked at Callahan then slowly shook his head. “No, and I don’t want to learn, either.”

“You can swim, can’t you? I mean, you passed the physical agility test to get into the academy, right?”

Bullitt nodded, but Harry could see it was an evasive maneuver designed to stall for time. 

“So,” Harry added, “we need to check and see if our assumptions are provable, right? There’s only one way we can do that, Frank. We have to go down there and take a look around for evidence of this…thing…”

“You know how to dive?”

“A little. I’m not certified, but I know the basics.”

Bullitt looked out at the black water and a shiver ran up his spine. “So? How do we do that?”

“Get an instructor, take a few lessons and then have him take us out…to take a look around.”

Still staring at the water, Bullitt sighed and his head lowered fractionally. “So cold,” he whispered. “So cold out there…”

Now Bullitt’s face was old and gray, almost sickly, and Callahan was suddenly concerned for his friend. “You okay, Frank?”

But Bullitt looked up at Callahan again, slowly shaking his head as he did. “No, Harry. Something is very, very wrong. I’m telling you…we’ve missed something…”

+++++

The nurse ran from Devlin’s room, calling out for Dr. Weyland as she stumbled and reached out for a wall to stop her fall.

Weyland came out of his study with a little black bag in hand.

“Come quick,” the nurse shrieked hysterically. “It’s happening again!”

Weyland sprinted past the confounded woman – wondering why it was so hard to administer a shot…

But when he entered Devlin’s room he shuddered to a stop, and with his mouth hanging open he suddenly understood what the trouble was…

…because as he looked at her, Devlin was slowly fading in and out of view…

…and then he realized she was inside a shimmering sphere, translucent – yet vaguely blue…

…and suddenly he felt an icy cold mist flooding into her room, and the mist smelled of the sea, the deep sea…

And when he reached out for her the sphere reacted violently and the next thing he knew he had flown across the room and slammed into a wall…

…and when he came to, Weyland knew that Devlin was gone.

And soon, even the memory of her would be gone, so he grabbed a notepad and started writing.

+++++

Down there in the mist in a place few know, an Old Man pushes aside the curtains of time and watches as the girl disappears. He watches and then looks down because he knows he has been betrayed.

But it is too soon to be angry, and there is still time to set things right.

He feels it then. That presence. He looks around and through the mist, not sure what to expect this time, but he knows it is out there, waiting.

+++++

A tall, slim man wearing a ragged old hoodie watches the Old Man from the shadows, and he is smiling at the frustration he sees.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word

[Foo Fighters \\ Come Alive]

Oh, Harry, what have you gotten yourself into this time? Time for tea?

[Gerry Rafferty \\ Baker Street]

C1.6

Callahan jogged from his apartment to the Central Division homicide bureau on Bryant Street at least three times a week, getting there early enough to put in fifteen minutes in the weight room before taking a quick shower in the locker room. Once dressed he usually walked up the stairs to the main Homicide Bureau offices before picking up a cup of coffee and flopping down at his desk to catch his breath, and after half a cup he would usually walk over to his ‘mail box’ and pick up copies of incident reports from Patrol he’d been assigned. With those in hand he would then drop by Captain Bennett’s office to pick up any assignments from him, then he’d spend a few hours reading through the incident reports from the shifts before to see if follow-up investigations were warranted.

But not this morning.

By the time he’d made it to the coffee pot he saw Bennett standing in the doorway to his office – and he was just waiting for him. “Good morning, Captain…”

“My office. Now,” Bennett growled, his jowls pulsing in scarlet waves.

Callahan sighed and took a pass on the coffee – for now – then he trudged into Bennett’s office but came up short. Al Bressler and DiGiorgio were already in the room, as were Captain McKay – and Frank Bullitt.

“Shut the door, Callahan,” Bennett grumbled as the Old Man made his way to his desk.

Callahan’s eyes swept the room, his mind anxiously trying to get a read on the mood, but even Bullitt looked as confused as Callahan now felt.

“Alright,” Bennett said as he picked up a blue incident report form from his desk, “as you know, Harry and DiGiorgio had a weird one a few nights ago, but he and I were doing some followup last night down at the scene and we, both Harry and myself, saw something…well, something of interest. But before we get to that, Lieutenant Briggs called me at four this morning to let me know there’d been another incident. The victim was a piano player working at one of the jazz joints down near the wharf. He and some friends walked down to look at the fishing boats after the place closed, and something came out of the water and hit this guy with something, well, with something that literally blew his body apart. Like Harry’s case a few nights ago, there was nothing left but blood and body fluids, no bone, no sinew, no nothing, and now we have five witnesses that describe the same thing. Black, slimy body, described as looking like wet snake’s skin, vaguely human in shape but much taller, like seven or eight feet tall, and when it fled the scene all five witnesses saw a large green area of what looked like glowing gas, green glowing gas, under the fishing boats down there. Divers couldn’t find anything.”

Bennett paused and looked around the room.

“You said the victim was a pianist?” Callahan asked.

“That’s right.”

“My reporting person is a pianist,” Callahan said. 

“Coincidence?” Bennett wondered out loud.

Frank Bullitt cleared his throat: “No such thing as a coincidence in a homicide investigation, Captain. It’s a lead.”

Bennett nodded then turned and looked at Harry. “You play the piano, right?”

“I, uh, yeah, I play a little.”

Bennett nodded. “Okay, I want you and Bullitt on the case from last night, so Harry, get Frank up to speed on your original incident report and include yesterday’s events, then you’d better head out and get your witness interviews knocked out. I’m still not sure what we’re dealing with here, and I’m still not sure if we’re dealing with a human or some kind of marine life, but we need some answers in order to develop some kind of protective strategy. DiGiorgio? I want you to take Gonzales and a crime scene artist and talk with last night’s witnesses, get some idea of what this thing looks like, then take your sketches up to Steinhart and see if any of the biologists up there can help us figure this thing out.”

DiGiorgio nodded. “Right. Anyone know where Chico is?”

“Weight room,” Callahan said. “He doesn’t come in ’til ten, so he’ll be down there now.”

Bullitt and Callahan walked out of Bennett’s office and went to Harry’s desk, but both stopped off at the coffee pot on the way. “What happened yesterday?” Bullitt asked as they sat at Harry’s desk, nursing hot cups of coffee. “Bennett looks pretty miffed.”

Callahan recounted their day out on the water, all of it, finishing up with spotting the head and torso of this black creature in the water by the marina.

“You’re kidding, right? You sayin’ you two really saw this thing?”

“We both did…yeah. About a hundred, hundred and fifty feet away. Shiny and with amber eyes. Big eyes…” Callahan said, his voice almost trancelike as his mind drifted back to the moment he’d felt those amber eyes.

“So, what’s up with you and this girl? Devlin, is it?”

“Yeah, and nothing’s up.”

Bullitt looked at Callahan, his eyes looking for an opening – as if he was peeling through layers of deceit, pushing past the dangling webs of his momentary diversions. “Bennett said she’s on some kind of heavy psych meds. Know what’s going on with her?”

“No,” Callahan said, suddenly on the defensive.

“Seems like basic stuff, Callahan, so I’m wondering why you’re protecting her…?”

“Am I?”

Bullitt shook his head. “Any other witnesses last night?”

“Yeah. An old guy out taking a walk stopped and stared at the thing, too – but then it was like he just faded into the fog.”

“How thick was it last night?”

“I’d say I could see things that were maybe a hundred yards away, like to Broderick Street.”

“Which way did the old guy walk when he left?”

“West on Mason…I think…” Callahan whispered.

“So, towards the trees?”

“Yeah.”

“What was he wearing?”

Callahan closed his eyes and drifted on those other currents… “Cape – wool. Loden green. Gray corduroy slacks. One of those funky hats. Bavarian, like with the bristles on one side…”

“Did he have a beard?”

“Yeah. White, medium long. Bushy white eyebrows. Not tall. Maybe five-eight and two hundred pounds. And he was walking with a cane…”

“Limping?”

“No. But he did the damndest thing, Frank. I caught it out the side of my eye, but he swung the cane in a circle above his head then brought the tip down – and I mean hard – on the sidewalk. And then it started to thunder, like way out past the bridge.”

“Thunder? You’re saying you think he, like what? He summoned the thunder?”

“I know it sounds nutty, Frank, but that’s what I saw.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know, I know, it sounds weird…”

“It sounds as nutty as a fuckin’ fruitcake, Slick,” Bullitt sighed. “So, you got the number for this girl…at her house?”

“Yeah. Maybe you ought to call her.”

“Ya think?” Bullitt looked at Callahan and tried not to think the worst. Callahan had only recently been assigned to the bureau after testing high on the exam, and he obviously didn’t have any reported history of mental illness, but this crap was over the top. The only thing that mattered right now was that Bennett had seen this thing in the water, but Bennett didn’t see the old man and the cane – but did that matter. “Gimme the number,” Bullitt growled. “I want to get to the bottom of this – first thing.”

Though Bullitt only talked with the nurse looking after Devlin that morning, he scheduled an appointment to talk with her at noon, so he took Callahan in tow and went to the original crime scene by the yacht club, then they walked along the sidewalk where Callahan had seen the old man – and sure enough, Bullitt found evidence of two fresh strikes in the old concrete, and right where Callahan had indicated they’d be.

“Looks like a fresh metal strike,” Bullitt sighed, checking the area for similar markings.

He found none.

But Weyland’s house turned out to be, literally, just a few yards away. 

They crossed Marina and walked up Baker Street until they came to the doctor’s home, a three-story Spanish colonial, replete with red tile roof and a freshly painted, light gray stucco exterior. Bullitt walked up to the door – and a housekeeper opened the heavy oak door before he had a chance to ring the bell.

“I’m sorry sir, but Miss Devlin is having a bad morning,” the old woman said, apparently very nervous and speaking as if she was reading from a well rehearsed script, “and her nurse asked me to convey her regrets.”

Bullitt, standing with his legs apart and a hand covering his mouth simply nodded. “Ask her to come to the door, please. I’d like to speak to her.” The housekeeper hesitated, then the flustered housekeeper curtsied before she closed the door and scurried off in a huff, disappearing inside the house and leaving the two detectives standing alone in clouds of confusion. “Baker Street,” Bullitt whispered. “Where the hell do I know that from?”

“You ever read Sherlock Holmes when you were a kid?”

“Of course! That’s it! Did you read that stuff too?”

“I think maybe I read a couple of them,” Callahan said with a self-deprecating shrug.

“What was the name of that club where he and Watson hung out?”

“You mean that gentleman’s club?” Callahan mused. “The Diogenes Club, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

The door opened just then and a nurse stood there looking seriously put-out and angry. “What do you want?” she asked brusquely, her steel-gray eyes leveled like lances ready to do battle.

“I’m Detective Bullitt. Did I speak with you earlier?”

“No. I took over at eleven. What’s this all about?”

“We need to speak to Miss Weyland…”

“There isn’t a Miss Weyland here,” the nurse said.

“What?” Callahan barked. “Devlin? But I’ve been here with her before.”

“Oh, you mean Miss Aubuchon? Devlin Aubuchon?”

“I thought Dr. Weyland…”

“The doctor is Miss Aubuchon’s guardian.”

“Her guardian?” Callahan sighed, now very confused. “Where is her family?”

“I don’t know anything about her background, and you’ll excuse me, but are you with the police, too?” she said, her eyes now boring into Callahan’s.

So Harry reached into his coat pocket and produced his badge, and that seemed to satisfy the beast – for now. “We were out sailing together yesterday,” he added, “and a few questions have come up since. We were hoping to clear them up with her this morning,” Callahan continued, now smiling as politely as he could.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said, warming a little to Callahan’s sudden contrition, “but she’s not really up to seeing visitors right now…”

“She was two hours ago,” Bullitt growled. “What happened since then?”

“I’m afraid I really don’t know. When I read the morning notes it only said that Miss Aubuchon had a bad night and a worse morning and that Dr. Weyland had ordered an increase in her Haldol. She’s out like a light right now.”

“Haldol?” Callahan said. 

“Standard treatment for cases like hers,” the nurse said.

“Schizophrenia, you mean?”

The nurse nodded, but then she looked away suddenly and now Callahan thought the woman was concealing something, or trying to, anyway. “I take it you can’t really talk about these things,” Callahan said.

“She’ll tell us whatever we need to know,” Bullitt growled menacingly – now really getting into the whole ‘Good-Cop–Bad-Cop’ schtick. “But you know what? Let’s cuff her and take her downtown, run her through a polygraph.”

“Frank, take a hike,” Callahan snarled – and then he turned to face the now very cowed nurse. “Do you think we could go inside and talk…just you and me?”

Bullitt grumbled as he walked away from the house, really laying it on thick as he kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe I should get a search warrant first, huh?”

Now the grateful nurse nodded at Callahan and let him in, and he could see she was visibly shaken by Frank’s antics. “What did you say her last name is?”

“Aubuchon.”

“And what’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Page. Page Sanderson.”

“Miss Aubuchon isn’t really schizophrenic, is she, Page?”

The nurse shook her head and looked away. “No sir, I don’t think she is; in fact, there’re times when I think she’s being drugged. Like maybe to keep her quiet.”

“You work for Dr. Weyland?”

“I work up on the wards. Dr. Weyland sends us down here on our days off.”

“So a lot of people are involved in her care? Are you the only one who thinks…”

“Look, some really weird stuff goes on here, alright? With her. I mean stuff that makes your hair stand on end…”

“Can you tell me…”

“Look. No way, man…”

“Have you ever…when you were with her…seen an owl? A white owl?”

Sanderson stepped back and now she really looked upset. “You’ve seen it, too?”

“It? The owl?”

“It’s not an owl.”

“I saw an owl, then I saw her eyes had changed to…”

“Amber,” Sanderson sighed. “Yeah, and you better not be around her when that happens.”

“What happens…if you are?”

Sanderson looked terrified now, and she was shaking hard. “You…believe me…you don’t want to be around her when that happens.”

“I was. I got sick, I think I passed out.”

“Is that it?”

“What have you experienced…when it happens?” 

“I really can’t begin to describe it…”

“Have you…did you see a strange animal? Like shiny black?”

Sanderson nodded. “Oh yeah. I have…most of us have…”

“Do you get a sense that this thing knows her?”

Another nod. “It’s the thing that’s really protecting her, Mr Callahan.”

“Does the doctor know about this thing?”

Again she nodded. “He isn’t what you think he is,” she whispered, “so if I was…look, you be very careful what you say around him.”

“Are you saying the doctor isn’t who I think he is? What does that mean?”

They heard someone walking through the house. Heavy footsteps, like a man walking on tile.

“You need to leave now. Right now,” she said as she pushed him towards the door.

“Okay, I’m going. Thanks,” Callahan just managed to say before the door slammed shut. He turned and walked down to the sidewalk, then pulled the microphone out of his coat pocket and brought it to his lips. “Did you get all that, Frank?”

Bullitt pulled up in Cathy’s pale yellow Porsche and pulled the plastic earpiece from his right ear. “Yeah. Took notes, too. But you know what? I think I need a drink…”

“Hell, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” Callahan said as Bullitt drove away from the house on Baker Street. Neither saw the white owl overhead, ducking in and out of the clouds as they drove back to the bureau.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word

[Peter Gabriel \\ Darkness]

Yeah, yeah, I told you it was going to get weird. And what…you didn’t believe me? Well, let’s go down that road a little more and see what else is out there – just waiting in the shadows.

[Thompson Twins \\ Hold Me Now]

C1.5

Callahan looked up and saw Peter Weyland was now at the wheel and with a start he realized he was laying down – and that his head was in Devlin’s lap; Captain Bennett was sitting nearby, looking at Callahan with frank concern in his eyes.

“You okay, Sport?” Bennett asked when he saw Callahan’s eyes were open.

“What happened?” Harry replied, squinting at the sudden sunlight.

Then he felt Dev’s fingers running through his hair and he moved his head tentatively, saw she was looking at him, smiling and without a care in the world showing in her bright eyes. “You lost your breakfast over the rail,” she sighed, “then you slipped and hit your head.”

“You’re going to have a little knot on your forehead,” Dr. Weyland advised professionally, and with an offhand grin, “but otherwise I think you’ll live.”

Callahan rolled his eyes and tried to sit up but immediately thought better of it and moaned as his head began pounding.

“You might want to take it slow for a half hour or so,” Weyland added.

Callahan nodded and then realized the wind had died down and that they were sailing along slowly, the boat not leaning at all now, so he took a deep breath and just let go again – and a moment later he felt himself falling asleep…

“Hey! Sleepyhead!” he heard his mother say, “You ready for some lunch?”

He opened his eyes again and now his head was resting on a folded up jacket and then he saw Devlin was coming up from down below with a plate full of sandwiches, so he pulled himself up and rubbed his eyes then tried to remember where he was and why he was on a boat…

“Harry,” Sam Bennett said, “always has a big appetite. You need a hand there, Miss Weyland?”

Callahan looked around, saw the boat was apparently at anchor and a couple hundred yards away kids were frolicking on a rocky beach and a couple of other sailboats were anchored nearby. The air was still and smelled of the sea at low tide, and for a moment he thought the air almost smelled of iodine and he shook his head as Sam helped get the cockpit table set up and ready for them. Devlin handed over the sandwiches then disappeared below again, surfacing a moment later with a pitcher of iced tea that had big juicy slices of peach floating in lazy circles around the rim, then a little tumbler was thrust into Callahan’s hand. 

Weyland came up the companionway a moment later and handed Callahan a couple of Tylenol tablets and as he drank the tea Callahan thought it the most amazing thing he’d ever had. So simple…just a peach or two and it felt like he was drinking the nectar of the Gods…

Then a sliced turkey sandwich with a simple slathering of mayonnaise and a little cracked pepper, and a nice thick slice of summer’s finest treat, the beefsteak tomato, freshly sliced so the bread remained light and airy and full of goodness. Callahan took a few bites then leaned back and let the sun wash over his face and he couldn’t remember feeling so good – ever. Neither could he remember ever being so totally confused.

‘There was an owl back there. A white owl. I saw it. I watched it watching me and I was not imagining it.’

His detective’s mind raced to find an explanation where none could possibly exist, but that didn’t stop his reaching beyond the obvious. He looked around the back of the boat, back where he had been kneeling and retching and where he had seen the owl, then he remembered seeing the owl’s eyes were also Devlin’s…but that just couldn’t be…

He looked at her now and no, her blue-green eyes were still those of a human being and certainly not the huge amber orbs he’d seen in that blinking instant – which he had to admit was reassuring – but that fact wasn’t exactly comforting, either…given present circumstances.

“Where are we?” Callahan asked.

“North side of Angel Island,” Weyland said, watching Callahan closely now, “on a mooring ball in Ayala Cove. How’re you feeling now?”

“Foggy.”

“We’ll give it another hour. You should be up to snuff by then.”

Sam was plowing through his sandwich and enjoying every bite. “Where on earth did you find these tomatoes?” he asked. “They taste exactly like a summer afternoon!”

“Oh, once a week or so,” Weyland began, smiling now as he talked, “we drive down Highway One and check out the farm-stands set up by the roadside. This time of year the tomatoes are coming in and we found some good ones last weekend.”

“I’ll say,” Bennett said. “Do you get out here on the bay very often?”

Weyland nodded between bites. “Try to. Of course this is the time of year for it.”

Callahan wasn’t paying attention to this chatter; he was looking at Devlin, still trying to make sense of the morning when he saw a little white feather flutter off the aft deck and fall into the pale, grey-green water below them in the shallow little cove – and he watched as it landed on the mottled surface and drifted on idle currents into the maelstrom of a dream he didn’t quite understand. Yet.

+++++

They sailed to Sausalito as a cooling fog rolled in through the Golden Gate, and smartly dressed dock-boys helped them tie-off to the guest pier at the Sausalito Yacht Club, then the four of them walked over to The Spinnaker restaurant as the day’s sunbeams and cool breezes gave way to scudding clouds creeping in over the low coastal foothills. Shadows fell away to the blues and grays of evening and the sudden enveloping warmth inside the restaurant felt soothing, like a respite from the changes they had endured that day. Glasses clinking, women batting their eyes at passing men, men staring at passing legs – everything as it should be…just another night in the land of plenty.

Weyland recommended a few things on the menu and drinks appeared, then plates of fresh seafood in a bewildering display of excess that Callahan simply couldn’t relate to. Was Weyland, he wondered, trying to assert the fact of his obvious wealth to a couple of poor cops, or was he simply a generous soul. But more than anything else, by the time dinner was over Callahan was left to wonder what this day had been all about…because Weyland had planned it all out, right down to their dinner reservations.

Weyland had put Harry back to work after lunch, stood beside him while they navigated around Angel Island before circling back and sailing up Richardson Bay, all eyes focused on the depth gauge as they closed on the old cream-colored Victorian house that now served as an Audubon Society preserve. Weyland was a patient teacher but for the life of him Callahan couldn’t understand what all this instruction was about.

And neither could Sam Bennett, but by the time Weyland’s foggy excursion came to a wet, soggy end back at the St Francis Yacht Club, he felt more than certain that both he and Callahan had been taken for a ride.

+++++

Weyland decided to head back into the club for a late evening libation, but he thanked Harry for being such a good sport. “Maybe you’ll catch the bug!” he said cheerfully.

“Oh? What bug is that?”

“Sailing, of course. And anytime you’d like to go out please let Devlin know and we’ll try to lay something on! You’re an able student and I enjoyed my day tremendously.”

Callahan nodded and smiled. “I did too, sir. Very much, and thanks.”

Bennett smiled and watched this exchange carefully – if only because Devlin remained well back and kept to the periphery now…as in out of sight, out of mind…but Bennett was certain the girl had, against all odds, fallen in love with Callahan. And that did not bode well, for anyone. But Sam caught the goodbyes and remembered where he was, so he added a cheerful: “I did as well, Doctor. Thank you for a memorable day.”

“You’re most welcome, Captain. I hope to see you both soon,” he said, now looking at Devlin. “Perhaps now would be a good time to take Captain Bennett and Callahan down to where all this happened,” he said to her before adding: “I’ll probably be late so let yourself in. I won’t see you ‘til morning.”

She nodded then walked up to Harry and took his hand. “C’mon, let’s go before it gets too cold.”

Bennett fell in behind Callahan and the girl and he could feel Harry’s dis-ease at the girl’s suddenly aggressive possessiveness. As they walked along she pulled a reluctant Callahan closer and closer, and Bennett wondered why Harry was going along with her overt display of affection…

Streetlights were coming on now, and lines of glowing orbs stretched out in the gathering fog as Harry and Devlin talked about what she thought the ‘creature’ was; she had no idea but when Callahan suggested squids and octopi she just shrugged and gathered herself up against the growing chill. Sam listened intently – but he also watched her body language, looking for signs of reluctance or deceit. Or insincerity.

And he saw nothing of the sort. Not even ambivalence. Yet he could feel her fear as they approached the spot where the boy had been eviscerated.

There was still ample evidence something terrible had gone down on that beach; there were still deep maroon splotches on the sand where neither time nor tide had lingered long enough to wash away the quiet detritus of death. The water was calm now, very calm, and if not for the glowing orbs reflected on the inky black surface there would have been no way to see any difference between this water and crude oil.

And then an Old Man wearing a cape and walking with the aid a walking stick approached, and while the old fella tipped his hat as he passed he said not a word. Sam watched the old man for a moment, as the old man approached Mason Street, and when he stopped suddenly and looked out over the water Sam turned and looked too.

And he saw something out there. Almost like a man but tall and slimy-black, black with latent malice – and the thing suddenly turned and was staring at Devlin.

“Callahan?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you see that?”

Callahan turned and looked at Sam, then followed his eyes. “What the hell is that, Captain?”

“That’s it,” Devlin whispered. “That’s what got Jimmy…”

Bennett reached for the Colt 1911 in the shoulder holster under his left arm and pulled it free…

…and at the same time the Old Man slammed the silver tip of his cane down onto the sidewalk…

…and the creature slipped under the inky surface and disappeared, just as thunder rumbled somewhere out beyond the Golden Gate.

And when Bennett turned to find the old man he found that he too was gone.

Standing next to a streetlight not at all far from where Bennett, Callahan, and Devlin stood, a tall, thin man stood watching. He coughed once then lit a cigarette before he disappeared in a passing shadow.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word…

[Peter Gabriel \\ Red Rain]

Things aren’t always what they seem deep inside the memory warehouse, but you knew that already. Didn’t you?

[Spirit \\ Nature’s Way]

Right…off we go.

C1.4

The water in the yacht club’s marina looked to be about the same color as the sky, a deep cerulean blue and with not a cloud visible anywhere Callahan looked. There were, however, whitecaps all over the bay and a crisp 25 to 30 knot wind was funneling in through the Golden Gate. Looking at the bay, the few sailors out there seemed, as far as he could tell, to have their hands full. Callahan and Bennett looked at one another with their eyes wide open now, and both now seriously regretted popping by Bennett’s favorite diner for pancakes and eggs before heading down to the marina.

Callahan saw Dev Weyland standing up on the front of a sleek looking sailboat, and when their eyes met she waved at them.

“Wow,” Bennett smirked, “now I know why you’ve taken such an interest in the case. Sheesh, Harry, she’s a knockout!”

And Callahan had to admit that right now, standing out there in the sun and the wind she looked as pretty as any woman he’d ever seen. Her long chestnut hair was streaming in the breeze, and only a blind man could have ignored her smile – let alone her shapely legs; Callahan returned her wave and tried to match the excitement he felt in her smile, but then he remembered her drugged out shuffle the day before and realized this had to be one of her good days.

“Just be careful, Captain. Her father said he’d ‘have her ready’ for the day, so I assume that means well medicated.”

“Did he tell you what her condition is? Or what she’s taking?”

“No sir, but he did say she hallucinates, so I guess that implies schizophrenia…?”

Bennett shrugged. “Usually, but not always.”

Peter Weyland was waiting for them at the head of the pier, and after he opened the locked gate he walked ahead of Callahan and Bennett out to his boat – hardly acknowledging their presence as he stared at the sky. He guided them along a narrow finger pier that divided two slips, and simply pointed at the boxy little steps used to gain access to the deck of his boat.

“My-my, but that’s just a beautiful boat,” Bennett said. “Are those teak decks?”

And once the beauty of his ‘yacht’ had been recognized – and acknowledged – Weyland’s demeanor changed in an instant. Now his face registered pleasure and pride, and Callahan noted a subversive little smirk of satisfaction on Weyland’s face as he led them into the boat’s cockpit. “Yes, teak,” he finally said, as if he’d had to think about the matter. “I think it’s Burmese teak, however the yacht itself was built in Finland. Devlin? You ready?”

“Yes, Papa,” Devlin said, still smiling at Callahan.

“Callahan, if you wouldn’t mind taking the wheel for a moment…?”

“What?” Callahan cringed. “Me?”

“Yes, you! Are you deaf, or are you simply afraid?”

Callahan had never sailed anything larger than a battleship in the bathtub of his parent’s house in Potrero Hills, but now he hopped behind the wheel and stared at Weyland as he stepped forward and removed a dock line from it’s cleat on the pier.

“Okay Dev, cast off now! Callahan, see the lever on the right side of the binnacle?”

“The – what?”

“The wheel? Pull it back towards you about an inch, until you feel the boat moving back a little.”

Pulling the lever back, he soon realized, put the motor “into reverse” – and pulling the lever further back made the boat go faster…in reverse – so Callahan looked around and made sure the boat was backing out of the slip in a reasonably straight line…and then it hit him. This was a test. Weyland was testing him, watching how he responded to an unexpected challenge, so he took a deep breath and let his instincts take over.

‘Okay…there’s only one way out of here and after I back out of this slip I’ve got to turn right, which means the back of the boat has to go left…’ He turned the wheel to the left and right and settled on left and he felt the boat slowly back out to the left.

“Okay, now move the lever to the middle and just let her coast along for a moment. Right. Good. Now, slip the lever forward about an inch and feel what happens.”

“Got it,” Callahan said, though in truth he still didn’t have the slightest idea what he was doing.

“Okay, straighten out the wheel and look where you’re going…and keep right in the middle of the channel here…”

Callahan straightened up and looked ahead, trying to guesstimate the width of the channel, and then he saw an instrument that was showing their depth. “This gauge says seven feet…is that right?”

Weyland nodded. “A little more to the left for about fifty feet, then come right just a little.”

Callahan’s gut was churning now, but the feeling was indescribable. He looked ahead then checked the expression on Weyland’s face then checked their depth on the gauge. “Still showing seven feet…okay, 6.9…6.8…”

“Okay, start a gentle turn to the right, and add a little power. See the knot meter?”

Callahan found it. “Got it!”

“Accelerate to 5 knots, but not a bit faster.”

“Right!”

But now it was Bennetts turn to watch – and he couldn’t help but think that this psychiatrist was playing Callahan like a fiddle. Not simply testing him, but judging his usefulness – and Bennett had been around his type in the Navy long enough to know where this usually led. Bennett wouldn’t have cared one way or another, but Callahan was investigating a homicide, or a potential homicide, and watching the way Weyland was twisting Callahan’s perception, knocking him off balance, was making his old ‘cop on the beat’ instincts sing like a canary.

“Alright…good,” Weyland called out. “Straight ahead another fifty yards then a hard left, and don’t let her get away from you when we clear the breakwater!”

By this point Callahan could see where the water was deeper just by looking at the colors off to the left. Shallower water was lighter colored, almost sand colored in places, while the deeper water in the basin was a little greener – yet as he turned hard to the left the water ahead turned blueish-green, then a deeper blue, and the depth gauge quickly dropped from ten feet down to 15, then 25 feet.

Then they cleared the breakwater off to their left and that unobstructed wind funneling through the Golden Gate slammed into boat, and Callahan felt a new pressure through the wheel – and as the boat began to slide off to the right he countered with left input on the wheel…

“Okay Harry…see the left tower on the Golden Gate? Head right for that, and keep her pointed exactly at that tower…”

Callahan turned the wheel and he watched as Dev and her father raised the sail on the mast, and it began flailing about like it wanted to beat itself to death…

“Okay Harry, turn a little to the right…”

And as quickly the sail turned rock hard…

Then father and daughter raised the sail up front.

And now it felt to Callahan like he was riding on the back of a caged beast that had just been released from its shackles, and not only did the boat take off like a rocket it was now leaning over so far that water was rushing along right by the edge of the deck…

Then Weyland was by his side, first shutting down the engine then trimming the sails bit by bit…

“See Angel Island over there?” Weyland said, pointing past Alcatraz Island. “The right side, that’s Point Blunt…steer right for that.”

Callahan noted the boat wasn’t leaning over quite so much now, but as Weyland fiddled with the sails their speed began to creep up, hitting 7 knots within a few hundred yards then stretching for 8 knots…and Callahan could feel it then…the boat was no longer a simple machine…it was more like a wild creature running free at a dead gallop and everything around him was literally humming as their speed increased.

A gust slammed into them and the boat leaned hard to the right, the right edge of the deck disappeared under water for a moment – until Dev let out one of the lines – and then the boat straightened up a little…but now their speed was edging over 8 knots and heading towards 9 and the sudden sensation of building speed was exhilarating…no, Callahan thought, it was beyond exhilarating, beyond anything he’d ever experienced before…it was almost like flying, only…better…

And then Dev was standing beside him, leaning into his shoulder again…

“I feel like we’re flying,” Callahan said into her ear…

“I know…sometimes you can almost feel what a gull must feel out here…”

Callahan noticed a freighter coming out from under the Bay Bridge, and then another coming through the Golden Gate, and he started judging his own speed while he tried to guess how fast the freighters were closing…and suddenly little alarm bells started going off in his mind – because to his unpracticed eye it looked like all three vessels were going to arrive at the same point out there near Alcatraz – at the same time.

But Callahan also saw that Weyland was looking at the two freighters and performing the same calculation – and Weyland didn’t seem the least bit fazed. 

Another gust slammed into the boat and this time Weyland looked at Callahan and smiled. “A little starboard…uh…to the right now, Harry.”

And Callahan could feel an immediate difference. When a gust hit and the boat leaned way over, turning away from the gust lessened its impact and the boat sailed more upright, so as the gust passed he turned back to the left and the boat started to lean again, and it felt like they were going faster, too. And no one had adjusted the sails. ‘Interesting,’ Callahan said to himself. ‘What happens if I turn more to the left?’

The boat instantly leaned even more, the edge of the deck slipping into the water again, so he backed off and steered right…and the boat leveled the more he turned…

“You’re starting to feel it now, aren’t you?” Devlin whispered, still holding onto Harry.

“Yeah. You know, in some ways it feels like a Huey…”

“A what?”

“A helicopter.”

“Vietnam?” she asked.

“Yup.”

Her grip tightened on his arm and she seemed to pull herself even closer to his side, almost like she wanted to meld with him. “I’m sorry you had to go through that…oh…my God…”

“What?” Callahan said, suddenly aware of a galvanic impulse ripping through his body. “What’s wrong?”

“Falling…falling…you’re falling and I see a white snake…and there’s fire everywhere…”

Callahan cringed under the weight of sudden recall. To getting his Huey shot up and crashing in the swampy marshlands just outside the perimeter at C-Med during the Ten Offensive, and he could see the white python closing on the shattered windshield and feel the machine gun fire ripping through the engine compartment…

“Harry? You still with us?” Sam Bennett said.

And in the next instant he was back on the bay behind the wheel of a sailboat standing next to a girl he didn’t recognize and he felt the concussive blast of mortar rounds zeroing in on his position then the womp-womp-womp of another Huey circling low overhead and he felt plastic shattering on the overhead panel as more machine gun rounds slammed into his Huey and now he was spinning spinning spinning in some kind of pale vortex…

“Harry?” Bennett barked.

And then Callahan turned from the wheel and leaned over the aft rail, heaving his guts out into the grey-green water of the swamp and the white snake was suddenly gone…

…and as he looked up he saw a huge white owl perched on the rail by the side of his head, its amber eyes staring into his innermost being…

And then Devlin was beside him, holding onto him, and after a moment she leaned close again and whispered in his ear: “You didn’t see that coming, did you?”

He shook off the flaming remnants of the Huey and the glistening white python from his mind, then he looked for the owl but it was gone now too, gone and as suddenly forgotten – so he turned and looked at Devlin, and as he looked into the owl’s eyes again she started laughing.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every word

[The Stewart-Gaskin Band \\ Walking the Dog]

Another quickie today, hardly time for tea.

[Pulp \\ The Trees]

C.3

“Where is she, Denton?” Judy asked her husband.

“I’m not sure,” he sighed as he looked over the dispatch he’d just received from COMMs. “A planet called Thedus, but it’s not in our database, so of course it’s not on our star charts, either. She’s been working on a bulk ore carrier…”

“A…what? You’re kidding!”

Then the blue light on the admiral’s intercom panel blinked rapidly – meaning that the Lars Jansen avatar was ready and waiting to talk – so Ripley hit the ‘ENABLE’ button and watched the boy’s mesmerizing blue-swirling form take shape on his desktop monitor…until it finally snapped into sharp focus. 

“Ah, Admiral Ripley, I’m glad to see Judith is with you. I have new information that concerns you both.”

“You look happy, Lars. What have you been up to?”

“Walking on a beach, I think. But there are times when it is hard to discern.”

“Uh-huh. No sand between the toes? And how many girls were with you this time?”

“I think I’ve moved beyond that phase of life, Admiral. I was walking with a…I do believe it was an otter. Yes, it was a sea otter, and he was telling me all kinds of things.”

“A talking sea otter. Lars? You doin’ okay in there? I mean, I know this all came as a surprise…”

“Oh, yes, I understand, Admiral, and thanks for asking. I appreciate your concern, but yes, I am most happy in here. I was always an awkward sort, if you know what I mean, but so many of us are. Now if I want companionship all I have to do is think about it and there it is. Talk about instant gratification!”

“Have you met any others like yourself?”

Lars seemed reluctant to talk about that right now. “It is hard to be sure, Admiral,” he finally said.

Ripley smiled. “I’ve had that problem myself, I think,” Ripley sighed. “So, you have news?”

“Yes, Admiral. I have found something of immediate importance. A video file left by Admiral Stanton. I found it on a drive located in an IT nexus in Armstrong City, I believe it was originally recorded on a personal storage device left by the Admiral Stanton before his…well, you’ll understand after you watch the recording.”

“Is it a personal message, Lars?”

“Some of the information is of a personal nature, sir, but most concerns the immediate situation we are now facing. The information is self-explanatory, sir, though I would say that many parts will need to be viewed by all the other captains in the fleet.”

“Okay, I’m putting you on the large screen.”

“Ah, Judith,” Lars said amiably after he popped up on a large, wall-mounted display. “Nice to see you again.”

“Hello,” she replied uneasily, still not sure what to make of the dead boy’s memories roaming free throughout the ship’s various computer systems. “Nice to see you, too.”

Lars noted her reticence as he pulled up the file. “I would recommend that you remain seated, both of you. Some of the material is – a little graphic.”

“I see,” Denton said. “Okay, start playback.”

A dark blue USNSF seal popped up on a pale blue background, then a recording date of 15 November, 2122 appeared, followed by a Top Secret classification and encryption warning, and that the material in this file was ‘TSC-Eyes Only’ and encoded to the Flag Officer(s) in charge of Agamemnon and/or the Enterprise Battle Group; a moment later Admiral Stanton’s steely-eyed visage appeared onscreen.

He was shuffling note cards but then looked up suddenly, and his eyes looked care-worn and anxious: “Denton, things aren’t going well here at the moment, but I’ve covered that in an earlier recording; there have been some positive developments recently, so I hope you find those files before you see this one. First things first. I’ve enrolled Ellen at the Merchant Marine Academy high school in Musk City, and I sent Walter with her. She’s about to finish her first term and I hear she’s doing well. I’ve done my best to shield her from events here, but I may not have been entirely successful on that front; more on that in a minute.”

Stanton flipped to the next page in his notes before continuing:

“Meteorological conditions on Earth have deteriorated rapidly – and much more quickly than anticipated, with the almost perpetual cloud cover resulting in over 700 inches of new snow in Washington DC, and 1400 inches in Boston last winter. The permanent ice line has now moved as far south as Raleigh-Durham to St Louis to Denver to Sacramento, and the icepack is growing exponentially now so we expect total ice coverage with the decade.”

Another page turned:

“All civilian governments on Earth are collapsing rapidly, and about the only thing that matters now is launch capacity. We’ve converted all warship construction to the manufacture of colony ships, and existing shuttles are running people up to these ships as quickly as they can be serviced and turned around. Still, with current projections it looks like we’ll be lucky to get a half billion people off world before ice completely encapsulates the arable surface, and I guess I don’t need to tell you but that will be that.”

Another page:

“Top Secret stuff here. Unknown how many people made it, but at least three large caverns in North America were converted into underground cities. Looks like there are in Kentucky, South Dakota, and New Mexico. I have no idea how successful these efforts have been, but if you get a chance you might look them over and see if you can lend a hand.”

The next page seemed troublesome to Stanton, and he stopped and sighed a few times before continuing:

“The Space Force has ceased to be. Simply shut down. The Naval Space Force is, well, I hate to say it but whatever remains of your fleet will constitute the remainder of the USNSF fleet, and with this file I am hereby transferring command of the NSF to, I assume, Admiral Denton Ripley – or his duly registered successor, if Ripley is no longer in command. There is no longer any civilian command and control network presiding over the NSF, neither is there any legitimate military organization with any right to command the NSF. Your only assigned duties are the protection of Earth and whatever might remain of the United States of America; if those entities no longer exist then as a practical matter it would be my recommendation that you take the fleet to a new world and start over. Do not get involved with this new civilian government…these BAPists. Denton, take my word for it…they are going to be real trouble.”

Stanton paused and looked up into the camera.

“Denton, of course I’ll never know how all this turned out, but I can’t help but wonder about what happened out there? Now, about Ellen…”

Then there came banging on the door behind Stanton, and his mood changed.

“Well, it looks like the BAPists have found me again,” he sighed. “The NSF tried cooperating with them, but in the end it’s my belief that these people are the common enemies of humanity. They make no bones about it, Denton. They plan to enslave us all in the service of some kind of pagan spiritualism that, well, frankly, I don’t understand. I can’t tell you how to deal with them but I’ve tried to resist…”

And at that point the door behind Stanton was blown open by some sort of explosive device and Stanton could be seen reaching for something on his desk, but then he disappeared in a hail of machine-gun fire and the file simply stopped at that point – and Lars came back on the main screen.

“From my reconstruction, Admiral, it appears he was closing the file when agents of the crown broke down the door. I did find the notes he was referring to and about the only thing he wasn’t able to convey to you was that an apparent alliance between the BAPists and the Weyland Corporation might not have been a recent event.”

“Meaning what?”

“That the BAPists within the Company may have been calling the shots for a long time, potentially for decades.”

“Of course…but that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I mean, it looks, by that point, anyway, like the Company controlled almost 90 percent of the shuttle capacity, so the BAPists inside the Company would have been in THE perfect place to make sure that only their adherents and supporters made it off world, and so only their supporters would make it to one of these new worlds.”

“So that’s why there haven’t been any popular uprisings against this new monarchy,” Judy sighed.

“Yes,” Lars added. “They entombed their opposition on the planet, so how could there be?”

“So, Lars,” Denton said, looking at the blue avatar on his screen, “have we been scanning areas near those caverns in North America?”

“Gee, Admiral, I thought you’d never ask…”

+++++

Ellen Ripley was confused and suddenly felt very off balance; this was the first time in her life that this particular Walter unit hadn’t been by her side, and she realized that she now felt quite lost without him. He’d been with her almost from the moment of her birth, he’d acted as her first teacher even before she started school, been there for all her birthdays and Christmases, and while she felt it might not be completely accurate to say she had feelings for Walter, she did regard him as something much more than a simple fixture that passed into and out of her life. While he, or it, wasn’t exactly the parental figure that Admiral Stanton had been, Walter had represented the pure, nonstop continuity that so much of human flourishing depends on, and now she felt that as an acute stab in the back.

Sitting on the bridge now, maneuvering the Nostromo into docking formation with the massive ore processing ship, she tried to concentrate on the readouts on the main docking display but found she was having trouble with even the most basic adjustments to the ship’s velocity vectors.

And now she was sure that Captain Dallas was noticing her distracted state of mind.

“Ripley? You got a handle on that drift?”

“Ripley, watch your rate of closure!”

“Ripley! Roll rate! Now!”

Then Mother spoke up: “Captain, I think I ought to intervene now.”

“Ripley!” Dallas shouted. “Ship’s control to automatic!”

Ellen flipped the switch and buried her face in her hands. Lambert smelled blood in the water and smiled. Kane looked up and shrugged. Dallas stormed off – but not before letting slip a long string of expletives.

And so the Nostromo maneuvered under the refinery ship and in short order the docking clamps joined the two ships, and with that done Ripley loaded the first waypoint into the current NAV computer and hit the ‘EXECUTE’ button. A thousand feet behind the bridge three drives flared, and the Nostromo started the first leg of her long journey to Sparta…

“Ripley!” Dallas’s voice cried out over the intercom. “Report to the wardroom, on the double!”  

“Oh, great,” she muttered as she popped clear of her harness and walked aft – and past a gloating Lambert – to the crew’s mess, passing her cabin on the way and wanting to duck inside to avoid the inevitable tongue-lashing she knew she’d earned.

“Coffee?” Dallas said as she came in and sat at the round table beside the galley.

She shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

“What’s our departure clearance look like? Any inbound traffic?”

She shook her head. “No, we’re clear all the way to the outer rim.”

“No new Outie activity in the sector?”

“Nothing reported.”

Dallas sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Parker says the ship is ready for sleep, but that means keeping Mother on ‘auto’ for the duration, and you know how I feel about being on autopilot cruising through a system. Any system.”

“Yessir?”

“It would mean an extra ten days out of the chamber, but we have more than enough food to stand a two-man watch all the way out to the rim. You mind staying up?”

“No, not at all. I’ve got some correspondence to get through, and some studying to do.”

“So, how are you feeling about Walter?”

“I’m not really sure yet, Captain. Lonely one minute, like I’ve lost a friend, then I remember he’s a synthetic and wonder if my emotions have been misplaced all these years, which only…”

“Yeah, I can see that becoming a feedback loop. You get any sleep last night?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I can’t leave Lambert out with you, so what about me? You feel comfortable enough with that?”

“Comfortable enough? What’s that mean, Captain?”

“Oh, you know. The whole man-woman thing, being alone with me for an extended period. That kind of comfortable.”

“Yeah, I’m comfortable.”

“Yeah? Well, okay. Let’s have dinner then we can put everyone else in their slow-cooker. You know, maybe read ‘em a bedside story before we tuck ‘em in.”

Ripley shook her head. “You’re twisted, you know that?”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Kiddo.”

+++++

He’d decided on showing the Stanton recording to Davis and Farrell first – so he could gauge their reaction first more than for any other reason – but also because he didn’t want to precipitate a war within the fleet. Judy asked to stay in the room while he played Stanton’s message – and his murder – again, and he’d reluctantly agreed. He knew he could count on her for moral support if nothing else, but he didn’t want to edit out the personal bits and pieces and open himself up to charges of manipulating the data.

And as the recording came to its grisly conclusion Ripley found himself watching Neal and Dean and their reaction when the machine guns opened up.

“Goddamn it to Hell,” Davis growled under his breath – just before he turned away and wiped away a tear or two.

Farrell’s reaction was almost the exact opposite. “I’m surprised they let him get any kind of message off to us, no matter how it might be delivered,” Stavridis’s captain said. “Technically, that was a mistake on someone’s part…unless it wasn’t…?”

“Meaning?” Ripley said, his voice flat and gruff.

“Unless someone wanted him to get off a warning to us,” Farrell added.

“Then why cut him off in mid-sentence,” Admiral Davis sighed. He and Stanton had become friends after Davis had served on the admiral’s staff for a year, so the murder had hit him hard.

Dean Farrell simply shrugged. “What about the caverns? Any signs of life?”

Ripley nodded. “At all three of the big ones. Fairly big heat blooms near the last charted entry points, and an initial analysis points to reactors of some kind being constantly in use.”

“But if there are survivors aren’t they, well, wouldn’t they now be entombed under the ice?”

Again Ripley just nodded. “Sure, but these survivors would also have unlimited water and the machinery needed to punch boreholes through the ice, so they’d have air as well as water. With enough lead time we can assume they set up hydroponic gardens and even factories to make the bare necessities, so assuming those are all true, from there the question their existence poses to us is quite simple. We need to ascertain the number of survivors down there, and we need to come up with a plan to get as many of them off world as we can.”

“Denton, we have to be careful not to put the cart before the horse here,” Farrell sighed.

And Neal Davis nodded in agreement. “Admiral, we really need some place to take these people, assuming they want to leave, and we need someway to move them…”

“And you know what?” Ripley said, grinning. “It just so happens we know someone who can help us with both of these problems.”

“Oh yeah?” Farrell said mockingly. “Like who?”

Ripley punched the intercom button and waited, then – after Louise Brennan appeared onscreen – he smiled and nodded. “Why don’t you and your boyfriend come on in, and let’s see what you two came up with…”

(c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple

[What Is and What Should Never Be]